Wednesday, December 01, 2004

You're invited to the Scripting News Christmas party on Saturday December 11, 7PM-9PM, at the Hong Kong restaurant in Cambridge. Berkman Center is hosting the party, it's also on the closing night of their great I&S conference, which I'm participating in. There will be room for about 100 people, and we can do dinner after, probably at the Bombay Club on Harvard Square (where else?). Man it makes me happy to think about coming back to Cambridge in December. If you're going to be there, or just thinking about it, please post a note here.  

Today's podcast is pitiful. My poor voice. Laryngitis hits Uncle Bumba. The subject of the cast is "Users and developers party together." 

Dare Obasanjo: MSN Spaces Launched. Yet another blogging tool from a $300 billion software behemoth. In all seriousness, it's good to have Microsoft challenge Google in centralized blogging tools. Unlike search, this is an area where Microsoft's version 1 is good enough to win users of Google's offering, and Microsoft products aren't feature-complete until version 3. I have not used the product myself, but I will as soon as I can. 

Microsoft's RSS 2.0 support is well thought-out and complete. Here's an example of a feed produced by MSN Spaces.  

Post comments or questions here, please. 

Scoble has a list of five Microsoft people with MSN blogs. 

He has video of the Spaces team talking about the product.  

And a video of a product demo.  

They're pinging weblogs.com. We're going to need to do something about this soon. The server is already totally swamped. 

Other articles: Forbes, AP, eWeek. 

Okay, another ethical question. I got two emails at exactly the same time, the first came from an individual employee, Mr G, at a company named, for the sake of argument, MacroHard. This email was in response to a question I sent to him earlier today, because I was pretty sure the project he was working on was about to "go live" and I wanted to get briefed on it before-hand. My email didn't say any of this, I just said "How's XXX doing?" where XXX is the name of the project. Now get this: his email had a link to a post on his weblog, where he refers to the project as being live, and points to the draft press release. Okay, sounds like it's ready to go. But the next email says otherwise. Very clearly it says the project is ready to go, but the press release won't run until 9PM Pacific, tonight, and we can't write about it before then. Obviously the individual, Mr G, didn't get this message, or he wouldn't have sent me the URL to the press release without conditions. Bzzzt. I just got a call from the PR guy. The AP broke the embargo, that's why Mr G pulled the trigger. The product is MSN Spaces. See the links above. 

James Tobin, a Bush campaign aide was indicted for interfering with Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts in 2002. 

Mark Glaser: The Media Company I Want to Work For. 

David Brown wrote up our FrontierKernelDev dinner last night in Bellevue. 

NPR: "What happens when high-speed Internet users are forced to revert to dial-up?" 

NY Times: "Thefacebook.com, a Web site that began 10 months ago with five Harvard students and is now the most popular way to either network or waste time for a million college students at around 300 colleges, from Yale to the University of the Pacific." 

Australian IT: "Together they nutted out a way to use RSS to send audio files rather than text." 

Okay here's an ethical dilemma. Privately, a blogger says, in a phone coversation "Boy that product sucks. I don't know why anyone would use it. I hate it. Totally." Then a couple of months later the same blogger says, in public "Hey that's great stuff. I use it all the time. It creams the competition." Now it could be nothing more than the blogger changed his mind, but it could also be that the blogger is being less than truthful. What to do? Should I out him? Raise the question? In public -- or privately? 

Mary Jo: "Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week." 

Frank Paynter asked bloggers why they blog. I wrote my own answer. 

Nicco Mele and Mary Hodder will be co-hosts of the discussion I'll lead at the I&S conf. Nicco, who did his first podcast, unknowing, by leaving a voicemail for me, is in Rome this week and posting about it on his blog. Mary is hosting a dinner in Berkeley for Doc Searls on Thursday.  

8 years ago: "It was a tingly first-love-like experience." 

I'm sick again. Second cold this season. Sniffles, cough, and a new twist, no voice. All that comes out of my mouth is a crackling sound. I've never not been able to talk. Weird. 

Why I blog 

I honestly really don't know why I blog.

When I started blogging it was mostly to get a bunch of stuff off my plate, ideas I couldn't do anything with, things I wanted even if I couldn't create them myself. I hoped other people would read this stuff and someone would create what I wanted, and therefore increase happiness. Over the years I learned that this very rarely happens. People really want to come up with the ideas, even more than they want to be successful.

Once I started blogging it got addictive. So the most direct answer would be "I blog because I am addicted to blogging."

I also like the idea that I can have a dinner with people I don't know in almost any city in the world.