Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Dave Jacobs is getting a new (donated) kidney on Friday, Murphy-willing. 

CBS: "When a fellow panelist mentioned that bloggers had had a big impact on the reporting on Election Day, Williams waved that point away by quipping that the self-styled journalists are 'on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem.'" 

Kottke: "I've been contacted by a lawyer representing Sony and they have asked me to remove the audio clip." 

NPR segment on Jeopardy god Ken Jennings. 

Brent Simmons on the virtues of XML-RPC. 

An update on the car buying experience. 

Scoble explains the slow process of Windows bug fixes.  

NY Times tech columnist David Pogue has something resembling a weblog, with permalinks and an RSS feed. His FAQ also says that the archive of the Circuits section of the Times is now open to all and free.  

Marc gets off the cross 

Marc Canter responded to my crucifix post, with a list of metadata he'd like to see included with podcasts. It's interesting that some of the data he asks for is already defined by the RSS 2.0 spec.

For example, "What is the podcast about?" can be handled by the description element, that's actually been in RSS since 0.91. What keywords could be associated? That's the category element. When was the podcast recorded? That could be pubDate (but maybe he wants them to be separate dates, in which case we'd have to go to a namespace, not a problem). What are categories? Hmmm, maybe I misuderstood keywords. What's the diff betw categories and keywords? Isn't keyword just a simple case of category? (Please don't yell at me.)

The only two that clearly require new elements are: "Who is on the podcast?" (There can only be one author element per item, but podcasts can and often do have more than one.) And length (which may be hard to get from the operating systems, although it clearly would be valuable; there's no RSS element that corresponds to length).

Another place we can and will go for metadata for podcasts is the ID3 information that's carried along in MP3s. No reason you should have to download the MP3 enclosure to get that info.

Here's a screen shot of the ID3 info for a Morning Coffee Notes podcast.

Monday, November 29, 2004

Good morning sports fans! 

Like everyone else I've been following the weirdness at target.com with interest. I like shopping at Target. I didn't know you could get a blowjob there, for only $9.99. No picture available. 

I keep wanting to tell Marc Canter to stop jumping up and down, and (calmly and carefully) write a list of the data he wants to accompany podcasts, and we'll see what we can do. Now's a really good time to make specific proposals, not blanket condemnations. Marc sometimes misses things, like the Web for example. Podcasting will happen with or without the metadata. But it would be better with it. Drop the martyr act, it's borrrring, and get busy making a list. BTW, that's the first time, as far as I know, that a crucifix has appeared on Scripting News. Apparently it's also the first time the term blowjob has appeared here too.  

Tim O'Reilly will speak at the 10th anniversary celebration of the W3C, on Wednesday, in Boston. 

Kottke has audio of the end of Jeopardy uber-champion Ken Jennings' amazing run, on tomorrow night's show. "Too bad for Ken," says host Alex Trebek. Heh. $2.5 million. 

On this day five years ago, Manila shipped. 

Attention Frontier kernel developers in Seattle. We're having a meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Crossroads in Bellevue, to make face-to-face contact, and discuss various projects including the Python-in-Frontier work that David Brown is doing. So far it's Dave Luebbert, Dave Brown and myself. You're welcome even if your first name isn't Dave. Newbies are welcome too, but please C programmers only. We're going to start pretty early, 6PM, and go for a couple of hours.  

A warm-up job 

I need a quick programming warm-up job, so I decided to do something about referrer spam. Here's an example page. Almost all the pages it points to are spam. I'm going to create a blacklist, by checking each site, and see if it actually points at mine. If not, it goes on the blacklist, never to appear on this page again. Pretty simple. The purpose of the referers page was to show who was delivering the flow to my site. Then of course the spammers will include a link to my site and then I'll have to up the ante. Let's see what happens.

Before and after 

I just did the first pass, and it's nice!

I archived the old spam-ridden referers page here, so you can see the before. (Yes, I know the images are all broken.)

Now here's the after. What a difference. Geez. The cool thing is that all the sites in the list now actually are known to point back to us. So even if the spammers figure out how to circumvent this (they just have to point back to us) at least we share in the page-rank bonanza. They might as well work for us for a while.

BTW, this is Google's problem 

As I'm writing the code I keep thinking of neater ways to solve the problem, ones that would be harder to circumvent by the spammers, and still allow legitimate referers to show up. The problem is that they'd require cooperation from Google. Remember, the reason these guys spam us is to steal page rank from Google, by making it appear as if we're pointing to them.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

NY Times: "WiMax delivers broadband Internet connections through fixed antennas that send and receive signals across entire cities." 

Car recommendations from Scripting News readers. 

BBC is looking for radio fans. So they asked I Love Radio.org. 

Scoble is up early! (Or late?) 

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Drew's production notes in OPML. Boiiiinnnggg! 

When my plane landed in Seattle, I called the Dawn & Drew comment line. I had just listened to three D&D shows, and had the number, and just had to get in on the fun! 

Thanks for all the great recommendations on minivans and cars. You guys are incredible. First thing tomorrow I'm going to collate the comments and publish them. Enough other people have similar transportation needs, so I'm sure you'll find it interesting.  

Report from Sea-Tac, terminal A, gate 9, free wifi here too. Neat-o. Downloading my mail now, then off to baggage claim.  

Report from Kennedy Airport, terminal 8, gate 22, there's free open wifi here. An unsecured wireless router named "linksys." 

I was talking for a year about getting a new cellphone, finally the old one broke and I was ready for action. I had already asked enough people which works best, and wanted a service that worked in Europe so that pointed to AT&T with an inexpensive Nokia phone. Three weeks later, I'm still happy with the purchase. The service is a lot better. I've also been talking for the last year about getting a new car, and I'm not going to wait for the old one to break. Here's what I'm looking for, and I'm soliciting advice. 1. A large interior with lots of space for all the junk I move around. My SUV has a lot of space, but it's organized for four passengers, and I very rarely have more than two. 2. Decent gas mileage, but certainly not great gas mileage. 3. Excellent GPS navigation system. 4. Handles well, doesn't require alot of maintenence. So... all this put together suggests some kind of minivan, or maybe a smallish regular van. Any ideas? 

Doug Kaye asks how IT Conversations can become financially self-sustaining.  

NY Times: "Despite the best efforts of Hallmark and television channels rebroadcasting 'It's a Wonderful Life,' holidays have long been understood to represent an interpersonal minefield for some individuals and families, as much as a time for carols and warm reminiscences around a glowing hearth." 

Interesting post on bandwidth, viewed from the server logs of a podcaster. 

Today's a travel day. Leaving at 7:30AM Eastern, arriving before noon Pacific. Nice how the day stretches out going east to west. 

Friday, November 26, 2004

Gary Price on "impeccably maintained" web directories.  

Nicco broke a tooth at our lunch today. But that wasn't the end of the story. Here's the voicemail he left this afternoon. He said he wants to do podcasts. Hey he just did one.  

I notice people are using the term interopathon, a term which I coined, in an incorrect way. It's fair approach to interop, it treats big software companies with patents and open source projects with large installed bases, and smart consultants with their own implementations, as equals. Basically the door is open to all, the playing field is totally level, and interop with each one is considered important, and until it's reached, no one gets to claim interop. Unfortunately Microsoft and IBM didn't want to play by these very fair rules, and went ahead worked privately with each other and tried to force it on everyone else. The usual way interop is not achieved in the software biz. Eventually interop came to mean "Works With Microsoft" but since Microsoft's architecture astronauts were in charge, well, SOAP is pretty dead in 2004, sadly, because a handful of people spoiled it for everyone else. When I resigned as Chief Hardass, I felt like a kindergarten teacher, a failed one.  

Bertolt Brecht: "[Radio] is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes." 

Had a great lunch with Nicco Mele, former blogmaster at Dean For America. We talked about so many things but one of the last ideas was the best, imho. I said we need something like The League of Women Voters for 21st Century voters who want to think about their decision and need information and other points of views. That led to the The League of Blogging Voters. LOBV. Nicco said he'd grab the domain.  

Blog Torrent is "software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol." 

Draft spec for the BitTorrent RSS module. We plan to use this for Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, The Dawn and Drew Show, and a newly formatted Morning Coffee Notes (with its own feed and an easy way to find back issues, for all). We expect lots of growth in the coming months, and we want to help produce more feeds in the future, so we're getting ready, as are so many others. The combination of BitTorrent and RSS is all over the place these days, and that's super-exciting, and right on.  

Joel Spolsky: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."  

A test file for the BitTorrent implementation of Daily Source Code. 

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! 

Today's a day of walking and eating, talking and napping, movies and football, hugging and footsie, tradition and newbies, farting and belching, and thanking and thanking. And thanking. 

In years past I'd publicly thank all who I wished to thank. This year, it's a private thanks-giving for Uncle Bumba. Have a great day, month, year, etc, everybody! 

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

All Things Considered segment on BitTorrent. 

Kevin Marks, via IM, reminds us that Apple bought a company called eMagic, that makes a breakout box, that's probably a lot like the product that's being rumored around the blogs today.  

AP: "McCartney, after 40 years of second billing to his late partner John Lennon, has turned the tables on his Beatles collaborator by reversing the order of the famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting credit." 

Songs with lead vocals by John Lennon, Paul McCartney. 

For some reason now that I have an iPod I am re-discovering the Beatles in a whole new way. I bought $91 of old Beatles albums today, on CD, all for the second time (the other copies of these CDs are in storage in Calif). Anyway, I also found an excellent Beatles site, with excerpts from all the songs, video of interviews with the band. I've learned something new and important. Paul McCartney was the lead singer. It was never clear to me who was singing on the old songs. I thought John Lennon's style developed over the years, but it turns out he always sang the same way, he just didn't sing many of the songs. John gave a better interview, but Paul was the nicer guy, simpler, more commercial, for sure, but he did most of the work, it seems. I always thought I liked John better, he was the poet of the band, but then I found out that Paul wrote Hey Jude, Let It Be, Lady Madonna, and of course all the "silly love songs." Now I could learn more, and I expect to, but it seems that Paul got a pretty shitty deal from John. 

Tod Maffin has a picture of Apple's breakout box. 

Pet peeve. I was going to point to a podcast feed just now, but because it uses some kind of weird style sheet, it doesn't look like a feed, rather it looks like a really poorly designed web page. I'd like to request that people leave XML looking like XML. Okay the counter-argument: XML should just disappear into the background. Well, okay, but not really. When I drive on the Long Island Expressway, I see trucks. You might argue that the trucks should just disappear into the background, and I would totally agree. They take up too much space, are hard to understand, and even though they have labels, sometimes I can't figure out what they do. But somehow they're still on the highways after all these years. So someone comes along and has a bright idea. Let's paint cars on the side of trucks. That way the trucks can fade into the background and we can pretend they don't exist. Uhhh, something about that doesn't work. Could just be me.  

Adam Bosworth: "While the concept underlying RDF is simple, even brillliantly simple, it isn't how most of us think about data." 

I can't get it up. That is for some reason I'm not able to upload my latest Morning Coffee Notes. It wasn't that good, even if it did introduce a new meme: micro-politics, for an old idea, politics on a burg or burb level. We got so distracted by the national race, glad that's over. Now let's think about blogs on a local level. Based on the email I've been getting on this subject, it seems the time may be now. I want to lead a discussion on this at the I&S conference at Harvard in December. And otherwise help evangelize the notion that we can route around the TV networks, and create the political system we want, from the one we were given. That's the gist of today's MCN. I'll look for a Starbuck's, or maybe do another which is more musical. 

Tony Kahn's Thanksgiving podcast. 

AP: Lobbyists try to kill Philly wireless plan. 

Fascinating story about newspapers in Wired. "Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses." That's exactly why I cancelled my subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal in 1995. Most of the issues never got unfolded before they went into the recycling bin.  

Britt Blaser: "My dad hired the Macy's Santa Clauses." 

Sebastien Paquet asks about a weblog conference in Montreal. 

Tod Maffin: "I want to be able to delete podcasts or other audio content from my iPod after I've listened to it." 

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Microsoft's Dave Massy, who works on MSIE, lists some of his favorite DHTML sites.  

I did a bunch of email today with Nicco Mele, who I met at Dean HQ and at the DNC last year. Very smart guy and probably the most natural sales guy I've ever met. We walked around the Flint Center and I met some of his friends. They're interesting people because, while they supported the Democrats, they were, like me, just about ready to give up. Nicco and I are having lunch on Friday (he's also from Queens, home for the holiday), should be interesting. In the meantime he pointed out this paragraph in a piece I wrote about Joe Trippi, who he worked for and loves. "Here's an idea. We're as far as we ever get from an election right now, it's two years until the mid-terms, four years to the next Presidential election. Let's start raising money for a truly open blogging network, out of which candidates for local office can emerge, and new journalists, and empowered voters, money-givers, an army of citizens ready to listen, to learn, and feed back to all of us what they learned." It was a pretty good bit. Worth thinking about. Would I stop everything to work on this network if we got the $10 million it would take to do it right? Yeah, I probably would. It would be good for America, and not just America, for everybody.  

I still have to write a bit about Arianna Huffington. She sure was impressive. Full of energy and love. She and Trippi were the stars of my LA visit. 

My mom reads this weblog. On the way to breakfast this morning she asked if I wanted a correction. I said of course. In this bit, I said that Giuliani is a citizen, implying that Schwarzenegger is not. Of course both are citizens. What I meant to say is that Giuliani was born in the US, and therefore is eligable to serve as President of the US, without a Constitutional amendment. Of course, literally speaking, my statement was correct, in two ways. First, Giuliani is in fact a citizen. Second, Schwarzenegger is a naturalized citizen, so it's accurate to point out that Giuliani is a plain old citizen. My mom admitted she was standing up for Arnie because she also is a naturalized citizen. I of course am not, and could serve as President without an amendment. Of course I did inhale, so I'm probably out of the running just on that count, if not for all the others. 

According to AppleInsider, Apple is developing a "breakout box" to connect to its GarageBand software. "The external audio device attaches to a computer and offers audio inputs and outputs for attaching instruments or other audio sources." 

AP: "78 cents in savings, $44,000 in debts, $88.5 million in winnings." 

Dan Rather stepping down as CBS News anchor. 

Laptop update. When I booted it up in NY it found my dad's wifi network and worked like a champ. It could be that my apartment house in Seattle is a totally polluted wifi environment.  

Anyone looking for a podcasting use-case, need look no further. 

Welcome Jon Udell to the world of podcasting. As usual we get an excellent narrative of his experience with lots of tips and tricks.  

Reminder to people having trouble with their podcast feeds. Run your feed through the debugger periodically. It really finds problems.  

The subject of how a site gets into Google News came up at the ONA conference a couple of weeks ago. They claim it's totally algorithmic, but the choice of which sites to include is made by human beings, using a undisclosed set of criteria. John Battelle writes about a case where a publication, basically a weblog, indexed by Google News, went after Russ Beattie (they've gone after me too, and Adam) and he's pleading for Google to remove the site. This just shows how far out of whack things have gotten. It's time for Google to either withdraw Google News, or stop claiming it's algorithmic, or even better, make it algorithmic. They've figured out how authority works in the search engine, why can't they do it in news? Disclaimers: 1. Scripting News is not considered authoritative by Google News. 2. I think that's ridiculous. 

Paul Boutin's new podcasting piece in The New Republic. You have to give them your email address, but it's a good story. Cyberpunk/cyberpunk doesn't work. Arrrgh. 

Julie Leung: "Elisabeth's vocabulary is expanding. She learned to say 'BloggerCon' and 'Burger King' this month." 

Monday, November 22, 2004

Greetings from New York City. Hey it's warm here. The flight was uneventful. Not much to report. 

There's free wifi in the new Terminal A at Seatac. It's very nice and shiny. Feels international like one of the myriad terminals at Heathrow. I'm in a Tully's Coffee drinking a Starbuck's ice coffee reading the NY Times. Got all my brands jus where I wan em. 

Draft: How to extend RSS 2.0. This is a new howto I wrote this morning while packing to fly to NYC. It's just a draft. Talking with Adam over the weekend, I said "Hey, if you can fly an airplane, you can learn to extend RSS." He laughed, probably wondering when I was going to call him on the dumb blonde act. Anyway, namespaces seem so difficult because there's almost nothing to it. Like the Web, they're loosely coupled. Most of the glue is there to help human beings, the software assumes you know what you're doing, and ignores stuff it doesn't understand. Even though the core is frozen, RSS itself is a liberal environment, you don't need anyone's permission to extend it. It's really simple, as the name suggests.  

Tim Jarrett: "I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not 'innovation' in how the underlying content is expressed." 

BTW, yesterday David Brown announced that he has Python integrated with Frontier. One of the first bennies of releasing the Frontier kernel as open source. Andre Radke is improving the performance of the object database.  

There's now an API for Google Deskbar. 

Register: "Early on Saturday morning some banner advertising served for The Register by third party ad serving company Falk AG became infected with the Bofra/IFrame exploit. The Register suspended ad serving by this company on discovery of the problem." 

Wired: "Shared Media Licensing, based in Seattle, offers Weed, a software program that allows interested music fans to download a song and play it three times for free. They are prompted to pay for the 'Weed file' the fourth time. Songs cost about a dollar and can be burned to an unlimited number of CDs, passed around on file-sharing networks and posted to web pages." 

After god knows how many weeks I still can't get Windows XP on my cute Sony laptop to find these newfangled "web sites" on the Internet. So I offered a bribe to Microsoft evangelist, Robert Scoble. If he'd help my machine work on the Internet, I'd buy him a Pho dinner (they have wifi at my favorite Pho restaurant in Bellevue). Anyway, the night started out bad, the restaurant was closed, so we went elsewhere, and then found a wifi signal at a shopping center. He was able to get online in two minutes by erasing the queue of preferred hotspots. Then he farted around with my screen telling me I was doing it wrong, and only made it worse, much worse (he tells the story here) and ended up saying they're going to get this right in Longhorn. I was beginning to think I'd be a Mac user by then, anyway, so humor him, at least he got the Web working again. When I got home, of course it wasn't finding the sites, so I have a fancy $3000 DVD player. It's nice, but that wasn't the idea. 

Sunday, November 21, 2004

This afternoon I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the second time. It's a good movie to see twice because the first time you don't really get the order in which things are happening. It's a sweet movie because the characters get a second chance at love. And as they relive their memories of love, so does the viewer. 

Tech question: How to encode BitTorrent in podcast feeds? 

"thinkusaalignright"At the dinner in Vancouver I was one of only two or three Americans, the rest were Canadians. Of course they wanted to talk about the political situation in the US. What's to become of the Democratic party? This is much-discussed in the US too. Why worry? The diversity in the country won't go away just because the Democrats can't nominate a winner. Even within the Republican Party there's choice. Democrats could vote for Schwarzenegger or Giuliani (who is a citizen). Are either of these really any less repulsive than Kerry? Think about it. I'm now where I was before Kerry was the Democratic nominee. I think we do it backwards in the US. First we should decide what our issues are, then we should go shopping for representatives to represent us. See the connection? Represent. We end up voting for minor, almost irrelevant differences, and as a result, no representation, and our country can't make positive change. I don't believe the red-staters are bad or stupid. I think they're stuck in the same mess the rest of us are.  

On November 8, as a service to people participating in BloggerCon, I asked vendors to post pointers to services that would be of interest to bloggers. 10 vendors have responded so far. It's still an open thread, so if you want to get your message in front of bloggers, post a comment there. We'll do this again at the next BC. There's no cost to participate.  

Little-known fact in the RSS world, Microsoft's hit game, Halo 2, supports RSS. Here's a review by a user.  

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Care to caption this cartoon? 

John Palfrey: Pornographer sues Google on 12 grounds. 

The Dowbrigade cats aren't planning to sell their Google stock. 

Vancouver harbor at surise from the window in my hotel room. 

Adam Curry surfaces in the UK. 

The audio for the Election 2004 session at BloggerCon is ready. 

Had a great time at the dinner in my honor at the Phnom Penh restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown. All kinds of topics came up. A couple of people who had been to BloggerCon at Stanford earlier this month. A MORE user from the 80s (still has the bright eyes and big smile that was the hallmark of that community, this was before the Web and blogger dinners so not too many met each other, but I met them). We ate frog legs, but most of us thought it was chicken (me too). The food was delicious. Talked a lot about OPML, directories, Manila, Frontier, podcasting, what it all means. There are Jay McCarthy fans here, so far away from Lowell, I count myself among their number. At the end of the night about fifteen of the Vancouver bloggers walked me back to my hotel. Basically bloggers who come to these dinners are very nice people, we talk about their city, their country, I get tutored in the language and the currency, and hear a lot of ideas that I then incorporate into my view of things. I like that. Darren Barefoot has a list of the people who were there and links to their sites. 

As usual in-room high speed Internet isn't high speed. It's choppy. They use a service called FatPort. It keeps disconnecting.  

Friday, November 19, 2004

Barry Bowen on building a Manila-based OPML directory site. 

A must-read Ode-To-Scoble by Steve Gillmor. And Scoble responds! 

I've arrived in Vancouver. Didn't cough once on the way up, sneezed a few times. Feeling much better today. I have time for a nap before dinner. All caught up on my Gillmor Gangs and Daily Source Codes. Vancouver is one incredibly beautiful place. Everyone says that but it's true.  

Happiness is an American cellphone that works in Canada.  

Congratulations to Zeldman for quitting smoking. My own two cents. Smoking is an aid to creativity. I don't do the intense multi-day programming jags anymore, I can't without the cigarettes. The reason why, I think, is that the drug helps you tune out distractions. The smoke keeps interruptions away. Work that requires intense concentration is aided by things that push away distractions. But at our age, Zeldman and I are roughly the same age, after thirty years of smoking, to keep doing it would be suicide, and not far-in-the-future suicide, like it is for people in their twenties and thirties, but suicide in the near future. A few people get to smoke into old age, but it seems that most don't. So quitting is a way of giving us a chance of having an old age. So we can't push the envelope like we did before. But we can help others do it. And we can applaud it when it happens. And we can tell stories to kids on our knees about the old days when we could do it ourselves. It's not so bad. Hey it's better than being dead!  

Russell Beattie is going to work for Yahoo, starting Monday. This is something like Scoble going to Microsoft. Without the ramp up. Good move on both sides. It'll be interesting to get some visibility into Yahoo. We expect an interesting story. Natural Born Blogger meets BigCo.  

JD Lasica's movies of BloggerCon.  

Don Park: "Frankly, this is the kind of innovation we need to be thinking about instead of reinventing what is already in wide use." 

With all due respect to Jeffrey Veen, who I know from my Wired days, his experience with the email model type of RSS reader is exactly why that's the model you don't want to use. It's not like email. Let the river of items flow through your queue, scroll over them with a scroll bar, and don't let the software tell you you're falling behind. Your time is what's valuable, there's no value to the items you didn't read. If it's important it'll pop up again. RSS is not email. Don't sort them out into little boxes that you have to go to, make them flow to you, in a river, unsorted. I wish people would just listen to this simple idea, so many people are using RSS the wrong way. 

Mary Hodder reviews the new interface at PubSub.Com. 

Yahoo has a new way of mapping cities that's really nice for people visiting who don't know their way around.  

Vikas Kamat is from Birmingham, Alabama, where Condoleezza Rice is from, and he's proud of her, but observes she's not much-loved by blacks in her hometown. 

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Here's an idea, probably not very new, that came from a thread on Don Park's weblog a couple of days ago. Suppose there's an issue, say Choice vs Life (to pick something heavy) and you've got two people who like each other enough to be willing to have a refereed online back and forth. So there are three people, one on each side of an issue, and the third making sure that there are no personal attacks. The discussion takes place only between the two people, for two months, two years, two decades, two lifetimes, however long it takes, however long both have something to say. (Of course people can comment on the discussion on their own blogs, on mail lists, radio shows, where ever.) A document with three authors that's constantly being revised. Sure you can take vacations, maybe a month or a year at a time, as-needed. This would be different from a mail list, or a blog, or anything else. A deliberate respectful discussion, more about the respect and exposure of issues, than about settling the unsettleable. An interesting idea? 

Philip Greenspun saw Arlo Guthrie perform in Harvard Sq. 

I listened in on tonight's Berkman Thursday meeting with Marc Canter giving his semantic web roadshow talk. Here's a picture of Berkman, via Keyhole, where the meeting took place. Marc keeps getting cut off. "God bless Murphy," he says. I hope someone is making a podcast of this.  

Shannon Clark says that sometimes we seek out advertising. That's so true. I consume huge amounts of commercial information, every day, as I do my work.  

Stan Krute says (via email) that Keyhole is an accomplishment on par with Basic, the Apple II, Mac, Mosaic and Google. He's created a set of bookmarks that let one "fly among the major league baseball park to baseball park." A bbs where users share their discoveries. I downloaded and installed the trial. It's very interesting, not perfect, it was off by three blocks in finding the house I grew up in.  

Rich Salz: "WSDL 2.0 is the worst example of architecture astronautics I have ever seen." 

Wired News reports on advertising in RSS feeds. 

I take a stab at explaining why advertising in RSS is boring. 

Robert Raketty is starting a discussion of a Seattle BloggerCon. 

Brent Simmons explains why weblog editing is complex.  

Michael Gartenberg notes that blogging got a mention on last night's West Wing. Toby Ziegler reminds Josh Lyman that bloggers are not journalists, but not in time to save Josh from getting reamed. On par with the usual junk that passes for drama on TWW. I don't know why I still bother. 

Request for feedback. Last week we got a new server running, one which eventually, Murphy-willing, will host a BitTorrent-plus-RSS distribution service for podcasts. We moved Adam Curry's Daily Source Code to this server on Monday, and have had a few reports of problems. Neither Adam or I have seen any problems, the server seems responsive, but we need to know before we go much further if there's a problem.  

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

It's been an all old-Beatles day here in Seattle. The song I listen to over and over is Lady Madonna... "baby at your breast, wonders how you manage to feed the rest." It's the perfect transition song, midway between She Loves You and Octopus's Garden. They weren't quite tripping yet, I think, but they were on their way. It's not sad like Eleanor Rigby, not quite as deep as Yellow Submarine. Now what I want -- a $249 hard disk with every Beatles song ever recorded in MP3 format. Come on RIAA, cough it up. I want to pay! If you really want to break down the barriers, sell me a license for another $249 that lets me include the songs in my podcasts. I bet you make a $billion. Rockin out here in Seattle, love Dave. 

I'll be in Vancouver, BC on Friday night for a blogger's dinner in my honor hosted by Roland Tanglao. All are welcome.  

Heritage Foundation: Can the Blogosphere Transform Government? 

Looks like Dave Slusher got a good response to the idea of an unofficial unconference in Myrtle Beach, SC. I'd probably go myself, looking for a new place to situate for the winter, I want some place where I can get programming and writing work done. Turns out Myrtle Beach is very cheap this time of year. I've never seen hotel prices like that, cheaper than my apartment in Seattle. Makes me wonder what other parts of the US are so off-season but still interesting in the winter. 

Joe and Me 

I sparred with Joe Trippi on Saturday, in an effort to keep the room awake, and I think it worked. There was a kind of magic warmth in the room after the session. I thought people would be mad at me, but quite the opposite, they seemed pleased.

I've heard so many Trippi interviews, I could practically play the part myself, but there's one line he uses that's so right on, and I was glad to hear him use it toward the end of the show so I could agree, and then amplify.

He said that a campaign could raise a bunch of money, just for the feeling of power it gives the givers, and not even spend it (presumably on ads). Then I agreed, totally, but wouldn't it be even better if the campaign spent the money to make America better now, before the election, before we take office, as a gesture of good faith. If we can do something really imaginative and good with $40 million now, imagine what we can do with $1 trillion next year!

(An exaggeration, of course, most of the budget is pre-spent, on entitlements like social security and paying interest on the national debt. Defense eats up a huge chunk of the remainder. The discretionary budget is actually very small.)

Everyone agreed. So here's an idea. We're as far as we ever get from an election right now, it's two years until the mid-terms, four years to the next Presidential election. Let's start raising money for a truly open blogging network, out of which candidates for local office can emerge, and new journalists, and empowered voters, money-givers, an army of citizens ready to listen, to learn, and feed back to all of us what they learned.

Remember, the Internet has always been and will always be the ultimate research network. Well, now we need to do some research. What can we do better? How can we bring America together? We don't have to wait for the parties to do this, they won't, they're as obsolete as ABC, Viacom, the RIAA and the MPAA. As cloistered as CNN and the NY Times. As self-obsessed as Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken. To get to the next step we have to listen. It won't cost much money, certainly not much compared to what it costs to run for President or even the Senate or a governorship. We can invest in communication now, that's what we need a lot more of, and not the fake kind you get on TV, in the environment (see below).

The environment 

I had an epiphany on Sunday, on returning to Seattle, in my car, listening to the radio, in the environment. I don't know exactly how I came to it, or if I can explain it, but I'll try.

It's my car, I think of it that way, but it really belongs to the RIAA. I'm sure they see it that way. They've been willing to compromise to give me some of the features I want, but they still have a chain of ownership maintained all the way back to their contracts with the artists who wrote and perform the music they let radio stations play in my car.

I'm pretty sure you can't be heard in my car over radio unless you have a deal with the RIAA.

Once you think in terms of the environment, you can see that the times you step outside the environment are few and far between. I stopped in Sam Goody's yesterday and bought a CD of 27 Beatles hits for $12.99. The environment. I was coming home from a movie at a downtown shopping mall, Pacific Place, every store part of the environment, and of course the movie, The Incredibles -- totally environmental.

When you view things this way, you see how totally extrordinary the plain old PC is. It broke the environment. Hollywood didn't get it. Even the Internet was allowed to blossom, outside the environment. And what we've been struggling with, ever since, is Hollywood wanting to get their hooks into this space too, so we can be in the environment, safe, warm, etc.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Dave Slusher is thinking about a Myrtle Beach blogger's conf. 

Thanks Josh, and you're right, lurking in OPML is another big idea.  

A Google AdSense puzzle. For the first few weeks, audio.weblogs.com had charity ads. Now it has ads about Iraq. What's up with that? Why no ads about podcasting? (And after I posted this, the ads are back to charities.) 

One of the most interesting people I met at the ONA conf is Ken Sands of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. He's a softspoken man, the managing editor for online and new media, he runs the blogs at the S-R, and blogs are big business there. They use citizen journalists to fill in the local and specialized coverage that the pros no longer supply. Ken says he can teach a reader to be a journalist more easily than he can teach a journalist to be a blogger. That's sounds like my mantra. "If journalists won't write from a users' perspective, what's to stop the users from becoming journalists?" It seems Ken has put this idea into practice, in a big way. Let's follow what they're doing in Spokane, I have a feeling they're leading in a very important new direction.  

News.Com: "Stewart Alsop, the venture capitalist who helped foster TiVo, is leaving his firm to try something new." 

Something very mysterious that sounds like it should be up my alley, if I had any idea what it does. "MetaWeblog-compatible plugin for the popular Java cross-platform and multilingual Azureus BitTorrent client." 

Jeff Walsh: "Macromedia finally came to its senses and fired me." 

Two new BloggerCon session MP3s: Overload, Medicine. 

Scott Rosenberg on the Journalism discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Wired: RSS Edges into the Bureaucracy. 

KFVS, channel 12 in Cape Girardeau, MO, says it's "the first television station providing a news podcast. The podcast is the first block of local and national news from their newscast. The podcast is also commercial free." They serve 53 counties in 5 states, including Paducah, where I took this photo tour in August.  

Morning cold notes 

I'm finally having my post-BloggerCon crash. It's so predictable. Push yourself really hard, and your body stays up for the duration. Drive down to SF in an 800-mile rainstorm. Prep for and then manage a one-day conference, hanging out with friends from all over the world. Enjoy oneself enormously. Then hop back in the car, drive back to Seattle, having epiphany after epiphany. Rest for one day, then fly south to LA on a full plane. Sleep overnight in a room next to a bunch of hookers in a horrible LA neighborhood, in a non-smoking room that reeks of smoke, with a heater that doesn't work and wake up after two hours of sleep to a shower that doesn't work. Have a great time at a conference for reporters and publishers, make a bunch of new friends, then fly back, again -- the flight is full, the guy sitting next to me in the middle seat has his elbow in my ribs the whole way. I pointed out that my ribs are in my seat, to no avail. And of course someone on that plane must have had this horrible throat cold that I now have that's causing me to sleep 19 hours a day and the rest of the time walk around in a daze.

Yeah that's what always happens. I'm sick now, but in a relatively cheery mood. Next Monday I do it all again and fly to NYC for Thanksgiving, and then a couple of weeks after that, fly back to Boston. When will I really get a chance to get back in the groove? Maybe in late December when I hit the road again!

Monday, November 15, 2004

I've been hunting for a free or low-cost log analysis tool for Windows.  

I've also been hunting for the Newsweek article on the Web. Do you have the print magazine? Is there an article about blogging in today's issue? 

The opening session of BloggerCon III, where we sing the National Anthem (not the obvious one) and get warmed up for a day of discussions.  

News of Powell's resignation is in the State Dept's RSS feed. 

Scott Rosenberg: "At what point will our leaders get their heads around the simple fact that our enemies here have no back to break?" 

The audio of the BC session that Scott led is up at IT Conversations. 

Craig Cline summarizes the Mobile Blogging session. 

Okay I got tired of comment spam and got tired of waiting for Google or UserLand to do something about it. I wrote an hourly script that deletes all comments (on just one of my servers) that have one of several keywords in their bodies. Yeah, I guess they may change the URLs of their sites, and I'll add the new URLs to the list of URLs I check for. I guess I'm getting started on a race. The first two sites to benefit are the iPodder and BloggerCon sites.  

CNN: Colin Powell, Bush's Secretarty of State, resigns. 

Microsoft's search blog reports on an unauthorized leak, with screen shots, of their own desktop search tool.  

Rebecca MacKinnon: BloggerCorps? 

Don Park on standards bodies and breakage. 

Adam Curry's battery took a dive just before the move. 

A year ago I wrote that I was a smoker who doesn't smoke. Something changed. Today I'm a non-smoker. It's getting hard for me to understand how I used to be a smoker. 

The Accordion Guy has an old cigar ad to go with the times. 

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Back in Seattle. Nice to be home.  

Channel surfing, came across an old West Wing; I gave it a watch to see what changed. In the first five seconds it was clear. They used to do acting, very good acting. The scenes, the sets, the actors, all worked together. And they had some great actors. They still have most of them, but not the drama, none of the giggles as they hit your truth bone, over and over.  

Wired: "By nature, musicians are thieves." 

Anonymous: "Only steal from the best." 

Newsweek: "Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways." 

Here's the picture of Dick Cheney that so many are talking about. 

NY Times: "Microsoft is turning up the volume in the portable music business. And Mr Gates makes no secret that he expects to beat Mr Jobs in that market as convincingly as he did in personal computers." 

AP: Bloggers offer no apologies. 

I had an absolutely lovely time last night at the party and dinner after the panel discussion, which will be broadcast on C-SPAN (not sure when). It begins kind of slowly, but reaches an interesting conclusion. Not the usual soundbites, I tried to incorporate what we learned at political session at BloggerCon III. I promised to point to my podcast, recorded while driving through Oregon, on Tuesday last.  

John Robb says his kids use Skype for most of their phone calls, and they found it on their own, and price has nothing to do with it.  

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Check this out. The BBC has a podcast feed. Bing! 

Arianna Huffington: A Mash Note to the Blogosphere. 

We're getting ready for the 3:30PM keynote. I have a notebook with six items on it. The first thing is the story about the scream speech, what the bloggers were doing at the DNC, podcasting, sources with blogs, local contests. 

I'm at a session about automating news delivery. There's a guy from Yahoo who's talking up RSS, and a guy from Google, talking about Google News, Jay Rosen (the NYU journalism prof, BloggerCon discussion leader).  

Scoble is hosting a geek dinner in Mountain View, CA tonight.  

A Quicktime movie of Wonkette speaking to the ONA lunch. 

A Quicktime movie of Joe Trippi. 

A Quicktime movie of Jay Rosen. 

Listening to Wonkette give the lunch speech, now's a good time to say this. I realized after BloggerCon III that not everyone who does a blog thinks they're as revolutionary as I do. Wonkette surely is one of those people. She is very cynical about blogs, about herself. No matter, she was a random writer at AOL a couple of years ago, and now she's giving a keynote at a respected conference. How did that happen? 

AP: "Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of heart trouble, was having tests at a hospital Saturday after experiencing some shortness of breath, a White House spokesman said." 

Julie Leung: "If Billy Joel had been at BloggerCon, I would have asked him if he would sing Just the Way You Are as the theme song for my session. Of course, perhaps Billy Joel himself doesn't own the rights to it." 

I'm demoing my editorial tool for Mark Glaser and Staci Kramer. All I do is enter the text and when I'm ready to publish, I Save, and the CMS kicks in and does all the work for me. 

Staci Kramer: "Journalists who write about blogging need to remember that a single blog or a kind of blog doesn't represent all blogs, just as one journalist or media outlet doesn't represent all journalists." Amen. I just had that argument over coffee at the ONA conf. I am not responsible for all bloggers. I didn't leak the exit polls on Nov 2, I was driving from Seattle to SF. The journos tend to want to view bloggers as flawed versions of themselves. To me, the important bloggers are the sources who got fed up with being misquoted and routed-around. We can still work together, but every year another train leaves the station, we find ways to make-due without support from the pros.  

I used some of my battery juice to reserve a room at LAX for the night. It's a big new chain. The room will be sterile, soundproof, uninspired. I will get a good night's sleep.  

We're in need of some terminology for non-RIAA music, and yesterday I may have come up with one, which I arrived at this way. It's music that's safe to include in a podcast. Safe-to-podcast. Podcast-safe. Podsafe. Podsafe music. Voila? 

I'm in the conference room now, it's a traditional conference, a lot like the one I went to in Prince Edward Island. Lots of pros, some welcoming blogs, my guess is that most don't. We'll find out later. They spent a lot more money than we did at Stanford, the wifi is better, but I don't have a desk and I don't have power, so I won't be able to blog the sessions. My battery will run out in a few minutes. Not much I can do. 

I'm in a session where they're judging websites. I'm very confused, because there's no projector so I can't see what the sites look like. Weirrrrd. 

Hollywood coffee notes 

1. Hello from Hollywood!

2. I hate LA.

3. Always have. Esp today. It's a sucky trashy city, but unlike NY (also sucky and trashy) this place is flat and insincere. I'm sitting outside using some free Wifi, nice, after staying in a hotel with no heat, hookers operating all night out of the room next door, the shower didn't work, reeked of cigarettes, and it's in LA, which makes it all suck all the more. But now I have a Starbuck's venti iced coffee, I'm in the heart of what they call tinsel-town, and it's kind of pretty, even if one in every four people seem like they must be trolling around trying to get discovered. I'm here to talk with Arianna Huffington, one of my heroes, and Joe Trippi, who I've never actually met. And speak with all kinds of Online News Associators.

Friday, November 12, 2004

Wired: Longing for a Blogging Candidate. 

Scott Peterson is guilty. Watching the coverage I realized the trial is taking place in the same courthouse that I did jury duty in, in 1996. 

Indexed Forever: "Adam Curry is the biggest thing since Survivor." 

Here's another twisty media clash story, like yesterday's photo shoot with Newsweek, but with more media crossings, and bi-continental, using Skype, and involving citizens of two countries, with two of them in a third country, all happening at the same time. Adam Curry calls on Skype, saying the BBC has been there for five hours setting up to do a six minute segment on him doing a podcast. Would I mind being part of the show, from far away, over Skype? Of course not! He calls back. I make a note that we have to try to do what Dawn & Drew did with their latest cast, with Dawn in Los Altos and Drew in Wisconsin. Then I tell the story of Dick Cheney's dick, which is a hot topic in Wisconsin today, and now of course, all over the Internet. "It’s like a scud missile, for crying out loud." If you're in Wisconsin please please go get a copy of the Journal Sentinel, there apparently is a pretty good shot of Cheney's dick. Interesting bit of election news. The BBC guy didn't like it. Further, they didn't want Adam and me talking about them. It's kind of hard to do, and stay in the podcast culture. Sheez. We've got these guys telling us what we can and can't talk about, and we can't even talk about them, eh? And they're not even paying. For-get-it. 

Political Wire reports that the battle for the Democratic Party is on.  

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Comments on the botched rollout of Microsoft's new search engine.  

Jay Rosen led the Academia discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Rebecca MacKinnon led the Newbies discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Julie Leung, the DL of the Emotional Life session, summarizes. 

Tim Bray suggests that Atom might nearly be finished. I read his comments carefully, and find the benefits of the possibly-final Atom to be vague, and the premise absolutely incorrect. Unlike SGML, RSS has been widely deployed, successfully, by users of all levels of technical expertise. There are many thousands of popular RSS feeds updating every day, from technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun and Oracle, big publishing companies like Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Guardian, etc, exactly the kinds of enterprises that his employer serves. It's also widely used by today's opinion leaders, the bloggers. Where SGML was beached and floundering, RSS is thriving and growing. So to conclude that RSS needs the same help that SGML did, is simply not supported by facts. 

Scoble: "Halo 2 uses RSS to share game stats." 

My culture clashed with that of Elizabeth Grigg.  

Kottke: "ICANN has a new policy about domain name transfers which will make hijacking domains much easier." Update from Kottke: "The Netcraft article I pointed to about the new ICANN policy was misleading and I didn't check into it close enough. I updated the post." 

So we're in a totally different place, on Capitol Hill, called Victrola. It's totally packed, totally wifi. Taking pictures listening to yesterday's Daily Source Code. Everyone here must think we're weird. Okay. Hope this makes it into Newsweek. Back in a minute with some pics I took of the pics being taken of me. The photographer wanted pictures of me blogging, that's what I'm doing. Service with a smile.  

I'm getting photographed for Newsweek in a few minutes. There's a tradition of not saying what the article is about, to protect them from their competition, because of lead times. I understand this is for a piece they'll run in next week's issue. That's another thing, you never know for sure if the piece will actually run. We're going to take the pic in a coffee shop, probably the one I brainstormed moblogging with Scoble in, the one that caused the moblogging guy to throw a hissy fit. They want me to blog during the shoot, so we'll have to do it somewhere there's a good net connect. That's not hard in downtown Seattle, in fact it's hard to find a place where the wifi networks don't interfere with each other so much that you can't get on. How about that for a problem to have.