Tuesday, May 31, 2005

9:15PM Eastern: Arrived at the beach. Tired.  

The idea of using Netflix data to get a date is getting some play.  

5:45PM Eastern: Arrived safely in Orlando. Using the free wifi in the airport while waiting for baggage. Very civilized. Boston take note. 

Larry Lessig on amateurism. 

More on Deep Throat from Taegan Goddard. 

Good afternoon. I'm checked in at Boston's Logan Airport, gate B32, using their wifi service which costs $7.95 for the day.  

Reuters: Ex-FBI man claims to be Deep Throat. 

Today's a travel day, so light posting. See you in Florida.  

The discussion for last night's radio show. 

Just got a call from my insurance agent in Florida. No need to tell him I'm in Boston. Then the phone rings from someone in Boston. On my morning walk through Cambridge (temp 51F) I had the Billboard Top 100 from 1967, and let me say these are the songs that meant the most to me, programmed my brain about culture and love at the tender age of 12. Best song so far, Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. 

It's hard to explain this post from Kosso, so please, just read it.  

Charlie Nesson is the guy who talked about Socrates, and by coincidence, John Palfrey sent a link to his blog shortly after I posted the link to Kosso's post, about Betsy Devine, The Balloon Man, and some guy who said I was like Socrates. 

Monday, May 30, 2005

WGBH at 7PM Eastern -- the inaugural airing of Chris Lydon's Open Source. 89.7 FM. Guests are David Weinberger, Doc Searls and yours truly. If you're not in the Boston area, please tune in to the webcast.  

Kosso recorded tonight's show. Best line: "Revenge of the sources." 

A breakfast podcast with Betsy Devine in Cambridge, we sing, and she enjoys being Mr Jennifer Lopez.  

Betsy explains, in a movie. why people at Google, now that they're a huge company, do things that are not consistent with the values of early Google. Same is true at every other big tech company, maybe all big companies in every industry. 

A brief conversation with John Palfrey and Jim Moore who are starting an investment fund for RSS-related ventures.  

A movie taken out the window of a speeding cab of the Charles River from Memorial Drive. 

I wonder if Netflix has ever thought of partnering with Match.com to connect people who like the same kind of movies? I suppose Barnes & Noble could do something similar. Maybe therein lies a business model for podcasting.  

To Steve Gillmor, the constant evangelist for "attention" -- Netflix is in your corner, they actually publish attention data, today, not at some time in the future. If Match.com wanted to provide a service such as the one I described above, they wouldn't need to actually do a deal with Netflix, they already publish the data on a per-user basis, and they do it in XML (your favorite format by the way). So Match could provide a place for you to enter your Netflix user id, and they could go get the data and use it in their matching algorithm. How about that! BTW, so much for Dave Sifry's plan to invent a new format here.  

Four years ago: " I thought my father was a weird guy, but it turns out he was just European." 

I've been playing around with Blogger on and and off, and was surprised to find out after all this time that they don't have an easy way to edit a blogroll. They recommend by-hand editing of HTML lists.  

Two years ago: What makes a weblog a weblog? 

I was flipping channels last night and caught a profile of R&B star Lionel Richie, talking about what it's like to write a song. He says sometimes he's searching for the line that ties all the elements of a song together, he could be searching for weeks, and then it hits him like a thunderbolt -- boom -- mind bomb, that's it, and he can move on to the next project. Then I wondered if he actually wrote the songs, was he describing what it's like to have an idea, or what he thought it would be like if he ever actually had one. I have no idea if Richie is a creative guy or if he pays people to be creative, or if he rips people off and says their creativity is his without paying.  

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Two buildings, one old and one new, are just a couple of blocks apart in Cambridge, MA. 

I took this movie holding the camera by my side while walking. Maybe it would be more colorful if there wasn't so much brick wall, more natural scenery? Hmmm. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Mark Pursey has become the sixth member of the Creative Commons Choir, the asynchronous podcasting singing group that's now one-sixtieth as large as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir." 

CBC does podcasts. 

Central Florida podcast meetup in Gainesville? 

Time: "The wiki genie is out of the bottle." 

Mr. Gutman: "Once again a post on Halley Suitt's blog provides an opportunity for insightful social comment by Mr. Gutman." 

Amy Bellinger joins me in a Green Acres duet. You can do it too, you don't even have to be a woman. I have a nightmare dream that Madge Weinstein will do one. What about Dawn? Lisa Williams? Sylvia Paull? Halley Suitt? Burning Bird? The hits keep coming. Heh. 

Ted Turner to Dan Schorr, as recalled by Dan Schorr: "I forget, are you mad at me, or am I mad at you?" 

A BitTorrent search engine that supports RSS. Here's a feed that shows new downloads that have the word Billboard in their descriptions. 

I'm listening to Weekend Edition on WBUR. The soundbites don't change, and the memories come back. I had a good time here in Cambridge. The memories are good. 

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Good evening (7PM Eastern) from Cambridge, MA.  

Harold Gilchrist asks a good question. I wonder what the iPodder devs think? 

I just checked my email and then caught my breath and guess what, there's a thunderstorm brewing. Do I have the energy to do a podcast? Hmmm. Speaking of podcasts, I caught the first new Gillmor Gang in three months. Doc was great, so was Jon Udell and all the other gangsters were just perfect. Best line came at the end, Doc talking about ri ding up the roller coaster. Yeah. Looking forward to tuning in every week. BTW, the length was perfect for a flight from Pittsburgh to Boston. It finished shortly before they told us to turn off all electronics.  

Good afternoon (1PM Eastern) from Pittsburgh International Airport, where they also have very strong, free wifi. Yowowowowo. 

Mr Gutman: "Maybe there's a silver lining to this cloud." 

Good morning from Gate 54 in Terminal B at Orlando International Airport where they have a very strong, free, wifi signal. Most surprising, and most excellent! 

More thoughts on the Boston Globe article that came out on Thursday. When you look at the amount of space he had, how could he justify wasting any of it on being snarky? Does he imagine his readers have any interest in the subject? If not, why is he writing about it. If so, imagine how frustrated the reader is. The subject isn't exactly a household coversation, like the suspected murderer who was camped out atop a crane in Atlanta (a subject MSM holds in great reverence, apparently, based on the number of Very Serious reports and hourly status updates). Thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the reporter has no passion for news, no respect for his readers, and certainly no respect for the subjects of his reportage. If I worked for the Boston Globe, I'd be embarassed, and would want to explain that most Globe reporters aren't like this. But then this is the second time I've been honked on by a Globe report. Another observation, even the snarkiest of bloggers would have more regard for his or her readers, yet this is totally typical for the pros who so hypocrtically claim that only they know how to report the news, that we bloggers can't possibly compete. Well, I hope I never am so space-constrained as they, and I hope I never develop the level of cynicism they've reached. 

Field test report on the new Sienna. It has great acceleration power for passing, and handles really smoothly on curves. The navigation system is a bit quirky, the route it chose for me to the Orlando Airport, through back roads and suburbania was surely slower than the freeway route, even if it was more direct. And it was bad for the driver's nerves, it was hard to tell if they were sending me to the correct airport (maybe Orlando has more than one). But I decided to trust it, I had loads of time to spare, and eased out a sigh of relief when I pulled onto a main drag, and saw signs for Terminal A and Terminal B. Whew. 

Toyota clearly has never heard of an iPod or an Archos. There's no damned way to play one that I've found. And I thought I was getting a satellite radio with the thing, but nope, apparently you don't get satellite if you get a navigation system. Now what kind of sense does that make! Geez Louise. Now I love my new car, but even an ideal lover has warts. I'll have to get my own satellite radio and dammit I keep wishing they put a mini-jack on the car. Maybe they want to hire me as a consultant for the next version of the car. Please, let's have some wifi support or how about Bluetooth? And btw, to Archos, you should really have a mini FM transmitter. Every high-end MP3 device should have a good one built in. Do the Belkin ones work worth a damn? I bought an El Cheapo brand transmitter at Target (it was all they had) and it didn't work. The signal was too weak. 

But like I said at the top of the report, Orlando Airport wifi rocks. Every airport should have free wifi. I'd choose Orlando over Jacksonville for this reason alone, and I do have a choice. One more thing, if you want to be sure to stay ahead in the power user race, be sure to have some electric outlets to recharge the batteries. You could even charge for that. (Honestly you could charge for the wifi too, but I really like that it's free.) 

Friday, May 27, 2005

A get-out-of-town pre-Memorial Day rambly Coffee Notes podcast. Music, massage, happiness, BloggerCon, Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and a way of decentralizing the podcast community to find the good stuff. 

ABC News podcast page. Great to see these new casts, but we could really use a description saying what's covered in each installment.  

NY Times on 21st century museum tours, with the people as curators, via podcasting. Bing! Bing! Bing! 

Sadly, Eddie Albert, the star of one of the most surreal TV shows ever, Green Acres, died today. In celebration of his life, I recorded his part of the show's theme song. Don't worry, you'll know what to do.  

Tod Maffin switched to the Mac, Rex Hammock continues to break his vow of silence on the Mac, and I had a long interesting phone talk today with Ray Slakinski, lead developer of iPodderX, a podcast client for the Mac OS. Meanwhile both my PCs are suffering heavily, one from spyware (installed exactly one year ago today), and the other, well I'm not really sure what it's suffering from.  

Seattle P-I: "Producing a podcast is still far from a one-click operation." 

SEW: Last Week, Google Had A Strategy. This Week, It Doesn't. 

Dutch Uncle: "Daily Source Code gets less interesting the more it starts to resemble an IPO road show." 

A Seattle coffee shop turns off wifi on the weekend and sales go up. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "FeedBurner has begun adding web bugs to syndicated feeds that enable the service to track use of individual items." 

Dan Gillmor has been calling the Bay Area housing market a "bubble" for as long as I've been reading him (and that's a long time), but if it is one, it refuses to pop. Meanwhile Dan's older brother Steve has coined a new term with sure lasting value. The Scobleizer Bunny. What an image! I'm sure Scoble will love that. Not many people know that Steve worked with Scoble at Fawcette, and believe it or not was my editor when I wrote a column for XML Magazine. Me, I'm looking forward to a Scobleizer pinata. Maybe at Gnomedex?  

Paul Krugman: "Although the housing boom has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined, the economy would still be in big trouble if it came to an end." 

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Hey the Washington Post is podcasting. Yow.  

A 17-minute podcast with the missing bits on Trade Secrets and Adam Curry. We started a technology, business and artisitic partnership in public, and never explained why it fell apart. This is my story.  

Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon has started a thread on the River of News style of aggregators, and I join in.  

The PBS show NewsHour with Jim Lehrer supports RSS. 

The Make You Go Hmm thread got pretty interesting today. 

Jeff Veen: The Usability of Subscribing to Feeds. I'm glad that Jeff is writing about this. Now that Safari has made subscribing easier, it would be great if the other browser vendors followed suit, and then carefully upped the ante. There's an evolution that could take place here over the next year that would make subscribing really easy. I'll write more about this soon. 

At the beginning of today's podcast I said I'd talk about how I'd like to go on from here, but I finished before explaining. I really do think the air is clear now. I want to be able to talk about podcasting business models, where it was difficult before because I had undisclosed conflicts, now they're out in the open, so you know how to judge my opinion. 

Doc Searls: "The podosphere is the new conferencesphere." 

Rex Hammock begins a series of blog posts he has entitled "How Apple Will Change Everything About Podcasting." 

In the very next aggregator run after posting today's podcast, an article in the Boston Globe about the rift. I'm glad I got my side out there. I knew the Globe article was in process, I was interviewed for it on Tuesday. I was pretty sure it would be about as superficial as it turned out to be. Also on Tuesday I said podcasting can go deep, and today here's the proof. It's a new medium and a new world, I don't care how much they sniff in pro-jo land. You can't slime someone like the old days, nowadays we talk back. So there's a silver lining to all the michegas, we get to use the tools in new ways.  

Finally the cartoonists are starting to figure out blogs.  

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

This week's developments in podcasting by Apple, turning iTunes into a podcatcher, is enough for an entire 17-minute Morning Coffee Notes. 

I booked a three-day trip to Cambridge for the weekend. I'll be a guest on Chris Lydon's first broadcast on WGBH on Monday. Had an itch to go north. Looks like I'll be in Chapel Hill, NC the first weekend in June.  

August 2003: How to name a product. 

News.Com: ABC, NBC News launch news podcasts. 

Tod Maffin: "Canada’s major cellular providers have just joined forces to create a single Wi-Fi network across the country." 

Interesting outside perspective on the fallout between myself and Adam Curry. I haven't read it in detail, but I will, before commenting. 

The announcement, earlier this week, that Apple will support podcasting in iTunes will give them a commanding position to determine the (defacto) standard subscription mechanism for RSS because they will have control of the two key pieces of software on a single platform. They have already invested in a simple subscription mechanism in Safari, but with iTunes in the mix, they'll have huge market power that they didn't have before. And of course with podcasting, the centralized aggregator doesn't matter, so their coup is complete. I imagine they realize all this in Cupertino.  

Apple's position is so powerful because they will have content people are interested in, the podcasts people have been hearing so much about. They are rushing to fill the gap left by the weak iPodder software. Tim Jarrett's critique of Microsoft applies. In years past, they would have jumped on the opportunity. Now that role is left to Apple. A few weeks ago a venture capitalist said we're in the first inning of RSS. I said that's wishful thinking, the first inning was six years ago. He asked what inning are we in? I said it's the inning when the big guys swoop in and take markets from the little guys, with lightning speed. The VCs invested too late in this market. They could learn the lesson, you have to risk to earn the reward. The time to build is before the big dudes see it. Way before. 

Marc Hedlund says it's time to throw in the towel in the fight among techies over the perfect syndication format.  

Chad Dickerson: "Maybe the beauty of podcasts is that we are forced to step away from our hyper-efficient RSS news aggregator world and actually listen for once." 

On a lark, I thought about registering for the Supernova conference (I'll be on the west coast that week for Gnomedex) but gulped audibly when I saw the price. AlwaysOn, with a stellar speaker lineup, is a tiny bit cheaper, with a 25 percent discount until June 1. Gnomedex is a better deal than both, by a lot. What do all three conferences have in common? Marc Canter is speaking. Maybe he can tell us what they talk about. BTW, AlwaysOn offered to let me in for free, as a blogger. I don't think so. I have no time for conferences where I have to sit in the audience and keep my hands folded and my mouth shut until it's time to ask a question. That's why I like unconferences where no one is less important and the interesting stuff happens in the sessions as opposed to the hallway. 

Talk of the Nation: Blogging Poses New Workplace Issues. 

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

An essay on the economics of the developing podcast industry.  

WSJ: Gates Casts Cold Eye on Google. 

Le Monde supports RSS. Via JY. 

Om Malik: "Like a man in love, I just cannot get enough of Bit Torrent." 

Paolo: "I must admit I am still not completely sold on tags." 

Rick Segal: "One talk -- two perspectives." 

Scoble: "I spent some time today interviewing the Virtual Earth team. This is MSN's answer to Google Maps, coming in July 2005. As you see in the video MSN Virtual Earth goes noticeably further than Google Maps or other mapping services." 

Tim Jarrett: "The good news in this scenario is that customers are getting a choice, as Microsoft feels the sting of competition. The bad news -- for customers and for its investors -- is that the most highly capitalized software company in the world isn’t capable of turning all its resources into bringing products like this to the market faster." 

Business Week: "Yes, the pace is slow, much more suited to a long stretch of highway than a morning commute. At one point in the show I listened to, Winer got up, walked across the room, and poured himself a cup of coffee. You could hear his voice in the distance. His point: This is a relaxed conversation, not traditional radio." 

It's nice to see a review of podcast styles. Why not slow down and take a look at what makes this medium different from others. Maybe there's more to it than radio; maybe, like blogs, it has something to do with the telephone? Small scale instead of huge. Maybe it's silly to ask how many people listen to your podcast, as it would be silly to ask how many listen to your phone conversations? (Hopefully only one!) Also, podcasting is clearly not a conversation, even more than a blog, it's one-way. I've never bought into the idea that a blog is a conversation. I think that came from the always-more-influential Doc Searls's observation that markets are conversations. That doesn't mean everything is a conversation. Hehe. Okay, imho a podcast is less a conversation than a blog is because one listens to a podcast away from the computer, and you have to remember to respond. That doesn't mean I didn't hear what was said, quite the opposite. When I'm walking or driving, there's less to interfere, I hear better than I do when reading a blog or an email, where there is so much competing for my attention that I skim for comprehension. Podcasts can go deep. 

OhMyNews covers BlogNashville. 

Tod Maffin is looking for Canadian podcasters. 

News.Com: Your chance to meet Bill Gates. Doc Searls would love this. Microsoft has no taste, they love the junk created by users. Meanwhile Uncle Steve is "trying to help in some small way" by sending bloggers to jail. Doc called it, in 1997. "The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt." 

Monday, May 23, 2005

Analysis: Why Apple and Google should blog.  

Apparently the next version of iTunes will come with a podcatcher built in. I'm accumulating data and links in a post on my podcasting blog. If you have more info, please post a comment or trackback to it. Thanks! 

Steve Gillmor: "On Thursday, Google laid down a 60-day window for offering RSS support in their Fusion operating system/office suite hybrid. On Sunday night Steve Jobs laid down a 60-day window for RSS enclosure support inside iTunes. Today, as the smoke clears from these two cannon blasts across Microsoft’s bow, Bill Gates must surely realize he’s just been upgraded to the RSS revolution. Hoisted on his own petard." 

Via Wonkette: Kara Swisher asks Steve Jobs last night: "Would you have sued if the Wall Street Journal had done this?" Jobs: "We might have. But the WSJ has serious thought behind it. The thing is today is that everyone can be a journalist. We are in a gray area and we are trying to help in some small way." 

Okay John Battelle, get ready -- I'm going to ask you an interesting question, I hope. You say Steve Jobs sucks because he's shutting down three bloggers who are publishing his secrets on the Internet. He feels justified because the courts have backed him up (so far). Okay, fast forward two to three years, when Google is even bigger (they're already worth twice Apple, today). Imagine they have a browser in their quiver now, and it's getting pretty popular. That's a reasonable assumption, right, I mean it could happen? Okay, so Google doesn't like us sharing their secrets, and they're kind of touchy, some of the things they object to don't even seem to us like they're secrets. Well lucky for them, they own the throttle. They can just cut off our air supply. How could they do that. How how how? Well, remember we decided it was okay for them to modify our content way back in 2005. They didn't even have to ask our permission. Not only that, if we said no, they could ignore us. They're just giving the users what they want, and we believed them. But why John is it bad when Steve Jobs goes to court to get permission to modify three bloggers' content, but it's really coooool when Eric Schmidt calls it a feature? I guess the users wanted it, that's the difference. Yeah, they made the trains run on time too.  

Google is at $255 a share, with a market cap of $71 billion. Apple is at $40 per share, with a market cap of $33 billion. One has to adjust one's thinking doesn't one? Jobs looms so large, but his company is relatively small compared to Google.  

Oy I had a meltdown on one of my servers today, all of a sudden Frontier started consuming massive amounts of memory on startup. I mean huge amounts. The system had run out of disk space earlier, so I figured a restart would cure it, but nope -- still the same nasty behavior. I tried reconfiguring virtual memory, no change. So I made a fresh pot of coffee, and started moving sites one by one until things settled down. Luckily things seem to have settled down after moving the first one! Hey that's kind of lucky. (Praise Murphy, I'm not worthy, I am not a lawyer, My mother loves me, etc etc.) This kind of crappy behavior by a server reminds me how nice it is when everything behaves well.  

Press Release for GarageBand Podcast Studio. 

WSJ: "It's far too early to write Apple's digital-music epitaph." 

Rex Hammock joins the Dixie choir, making it a quintet. It's included as an enclosure in my RSS feed.  

New York Metro: "Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was." 

Just curious, were there any bloggers at last week's Google Factory Tour, or did they just invite professionals? 

Tim Bray: "I guess they don’t need that kind of listening post." 

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Dramatic pre-storm beach pictures. 

Movie of a woman playing on beach with dog pre-storm.  

Steve Gillmor: "Schmidt says the battle is over and RSS has won." 

Rex Hammock discovered the truth about my new Sienna.  

Wow Frank Paynter sings like the Beach Boys!  

Dori Smith: "He won't read this, but it's kind of fun to needle someone when you know it's completely behind someone's back." 

Today's song: "On Deadman's Curve, I used to shut 'em down..." 

The Media Drop lists newspapers with RSS feeds. 

Potkast calls itself "The Google Of Podcasts." 

Interesting application of OPML by Wiley & Wrox. 

I plugged the OPML into my directory displayer, and it worked.  

Adding spice to Joi's online life 

Joi Ito is in a rut and is asking for... well I'm not sure what he's asking for. But I have some advice anyway. Heh. Here it is.

Try podcasting! It's fun and new, and people are happy when they're doing new things and growing. I'm having a great time, almost a year into it, still discovering new stuff every day.

And the flamers, well, they're part of the package. They're the web equivalent of people shooting at you. And if people are shooting at you, as some wise person once said, you must be doing something right. Really, I'm not kidding. I actually talked about this in yesterday's podcast.

You should listen to the flamers, up to a point. They are an indicator that lots of people are listening. Yes, they drown out the good people. It takes some time to get used to that. But the good guys figure out how to get through to you anyway.

I've been down the road you're going down, it's actually a loop.

New car 

I did the deed. I bought a new car yesterday. I spent more time shopping for this one than I ever had before. I shopped while driving cross-country, looking at cars parked in rest stops, reading reviews on Edmunds, Yahoo, MSN and others. Perhaps the best review I read was written by Philip Greenspun. When I had narrowed it down to two models, I used the excellent resources on the web to find out what others had paid for the same car in the last few months, and to find out what my trade-in was worth.

I got the car for two reasons: My old trusty Lexus RX-300 was six years old, and there's a lot of new technology in cars in the last six years; and I needed more space. Since I live without a permanent home, at least for now, my car has to be able to carry all I need to live. I couldn't get a bicycle, for example, because I had no way to move one. This new car, while not much bigger than the old one, is configured for cargo, I can get a bike now. That's an important innovation because I've been walking so much and losing weight that walking now no longer is very much exercise at all. If I want to get to the next level I have to upgrade.

I went with the Toyota Sienna over the Honda Odyssey largely on price and availablility. The local Toyota dealer had several cars that fit the bill, the Honda dealer had only one. So I was able to work out a better arrangement with Toyota. As both vendors say, both are excellent autos, full of features, fun to drive, really groomed for the market. I looked at Dodge and Chevy too, but the American cars just aren't in the same class as the Japanese.

I'll probably be reporting on the technology of the car as the weeks go by. I'm going back on the road in July, heading west, of course, because there is no more east (I'm looking out the window at the Atlantic Ocean as I write this). I also plan to spend much of August in Europe -- London, Switzerland, Italy and on trains.

Anyway, it's so exciting to have a new car! I really like this one. I think I'll take a couple of trips today.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Today's Morning Coffee Notes podcast is about my outliner, Windows, why flames aren't really such a problem, word processing, editing in the browser, how to do format and protocol work. 

3/4/01: "Text on rails." 

My mother is a Natural Born Blogger, in a league with Scoble and Doc Searls. On her blog today she says: "In the final analysis I'm talking to myself." Exactly right. It's good to know who one's audience is.  

News.Com: "Is Google following its rivals too closely?" 

I heard about Indigo today. Some at Microsoft think this is what Ballmer was referring to in the comments that came public yesterday.  

NY Times: "Can the kinder, gentler, tempered-by-the-trial Microsoft do to Google what it did to Netscape lo these many years ago?" 

According to O'Reilly, Google moved the announce date for their portal up from June 30 and promised "universal RSS support will follow." 

Rick Segal, a former Microsofter, says that Scoble and I over-reacted to the Ballmer quotes yesterday.  

I'm getting some beautiful responses to yesterday's thunderstorm podcast, and have asked for permission to run some of them. And Ryan Tate has a lengthy very interesting response to Thursday's beach podcast, where I recount asking Kleiner partner Randy Komisar to sponsor intellectually enriching podcasts about what's going on in Silicon Valley. Ryan says that in its early days Red Herring magazine did just that. Tate is a former reporter at Upside.  

Friday, May 20, 2005

There was a honkin thunderstorm brewing off the coast, and even though I was late for dinner, you know I had to do a podcast.  

Joseph Pulitzer: "Newspapers should have no friends." 

Jeff Jarvis: "I just quit my job at Advance.net." Congrats!! 

Discuss: Is Microsoft of two minds on RSS? 

Dan Conover: "Romance novel covers are pretty silly." 

Gary Turner: Long Time Lapse Folkography. Neat-o! 

Here's a nice movie taken during this morning's sunrise. 

Yeah, what Ed Cone said.  

Hal O'Brien, on the new NY Times web pricing model: "Fewer readers, less revenues, less prestige. Not often one sees a trifecta like that." 

Podbat Man: "This year's Gnomedex promises to be the one they'll talk about for years to come I think." 

Steffanie Muller reports that Swedish Public Radio is podcasting.  

OTN TechCasts are online audio interviews with Oracle technology experts, delivered via podcasting. 

Wow, I love what the Berkman Thursday group has done. They've got mini-BloggerCon type meetups planned through mid-June every Thursday. Very nice work. Now I know why I want to stop in Cambridge sometime this summer. This could get huuuuuge. What an excellent group of people. I knew they'd figure it out (even though I didn't forsee what "it" is). 

The debacle that was Apple 

7/8/97: "The key mistake Apple made was betting exclusively on its own people for new technology directions. Huge money was spent on researchers who were so inwardly directed they couldn't even see the worldwide web when it happened."

I had a longer piece here about Microsoft of 2005, but then I re-read this piece about Apple in 1997 and realized it was a much better description of this year's Microsoft. So inwardly focused that they missed RSS, for six years, they denied it existed. And now that it's grown so large that even they can't miss it, they reject it. Similarly, Apple management tried to reject the web. A total act of hubris and one that cost the people who made that call their jobs. (But don't worry they got new ones.)

History repeats itself in the software business. Watch it happen as Microsoft apparently tries to re-invent RSS.

And you can watch Google do it too. I suppose this has something to do with the fact that they hired so many people from Apple and Microsoft? Who knows. It's a losing strategy, for sure, for both of them. RSS is too strong, as HTML was too strong in 1997 for Apple to overcome it.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

A podcast from the beach with thoughts on what makes a good platform, an intellectual life for Silicon Valley, beach philosophy; a picture and a movie where today's cast was empodded.  

Sunrise over the Atlantic this morning.  

An Italian blog gets the scoop on today's announcement by Google that they're becoming another boring portal just like all the others. Follow-on report by Search Engine Watch. Now, the big question, when will a new aggressive startup with a laser-like focus on search come along to do to Google what they did to everyone else? That's obvious now, isn't it? 

If Santorum didn't just commit political suicide this country is a political disaster area.  

Zawodny is right, Google should embrace RSS already, it's getting late.  

eWeek: MSN Gets Ready for RSS Push. 

News.com: VeriSign sees business in blogs. 

Infoworld reports that Yahoo is getting into VOIP.  

audio.weblogs.com got a brain transplant today. Please let me know if there are any problems. 

Tod Maffin is a fantastic source for new podcasts. We ought to organize this better. Somehow we built a centralized system, and we already know that centralized systems suck the life out of communities. How can I ask this question. Tod, I have an hour to spare. What should I listen to? Or alternatively, let's say I want to give Tod my Tuesday walk-time. Every Tuesday he's got something good for me to hear. He had to make a gut-wrenching decision because there are really 18 things he knows I should hear, but I'm only giving him one hour per week. I have six other days. Who else should I give a day to? 

Apparently I am psychic. Maybe just intuitive? 

Dare is a nice guy, but I'm going to criticize the way he develops software anyway. (Ditto for Mike Torres.) Go study the competition guys. A few days of using software and thinking will save you years of figuring it out on your own. We did this investigation years ago, and you can skip all the way to the end of this exploration, and do the River of News, and be done with it. It's so painful watching you learn re-invent this stuff. "Only steal from the best," boys! 

Bram Cohen: "We've created a 'trackerless' method of publication." 

Om Malik: "BitTorrent’s new version is easier, better and well simpler." 

Steve Gillmor is back podcasting again. Yowza.  

A good movie is often worth seeing twice. 

Accordion Guy: "If you check the right-wing pundits, you'll see that a number of them have commented negatively about the unsubtle jabs that Revenge of the Sith takes at the Bush administration." 

Jason on Om 

Jason Calacanis is on a rampage, and I'm sure he means well, but he's wrong.

Please read on.

Om Malik possibly had the first word on the net about the deal between FeedDemon and Newsgator. But he surely wasn't the first to know. Many, including yours truly, were respecting an embargo, and waiting for the companies to announce. Well, once Chris Pirillo published his interview with Nick Bradbury, I felt safe in publishing my own thoughts, because I knew that Chris was also under embargo.

This embargo stuff is tricky business, but I agreed to it because I've come to respect Nick, and think he's a fair-minded person, and wouldn't give me a lot of grief in a situation like this, where I didn't particularly care about being first, but didn't want to be last, if you know what I mean.

So of course I pointed to Om's bit, when he was the only one out there with the news, but I didn't get the news from him, so I'm not under any obligation to credit him in my own writing, and neither is News.Com, assuming they had more than one source which seems reasonable since the Newsgator guys were being so free with the embargoed information.

Also, it gets ridiculous sometimes to link to the full chain that a story came to you through, and I often don't get that kind of credit, and while it pains me, I accept it, because really, most readers couldn't care less, and the readers are important, of course. Now, when I get something from someone I try to reciprocate. Again, back to Om, I subscribe to his feed and he gets great stuff, and I point to him regularly. I think I point to him more than vice versa and a link from me delivers more traffic, but who cares. I feel that once in a while I can take a link I got from him and point to it without attribution, because in balance I feel I've delievered more flow his way. Maybe it's like peering arrangements among backbones on the Internet. Who knows, but it's not so black and white, and basically I think News.Com didn't hurt anyone in this case.

More Adam 

For now, I'm not going to go deeper into the rift between myself and Adam Curry, only to acknowledge that now he's saying more things that are untrue in press interviews, punishing me for thinking he was ever a friend. My generosity with him is, in an ironic and unfair way, a gift that keeps on giving.

I guess it's not surprising that the mainstream press only talks with him, even when they acknowledge that there's another side to his story (as News.Com did). It's not surprising because if there was ever any doubt that he is one of them, there's no doubt anymore. He's a salary-man, working for a major broadcasting company, presumably trying to climb their ladder. They're paying Howard Stern $100 million a year. Presumably Adam would like that kind of compensation, or something approaching that kind of compensation. Lying about someone he probably once actually did think of as a friend (just guessing here) seems a small price, to Adam.

I believe the ladder is gone, it's like the Road Runner character in Warner Brothers cartoons, when he runs off a cliff, he keeps running for a while, until he looks down. Then, beep-beep, he goes into a nosedive. I think Elmer Fudd does this from time to time too. When there is a podcaster on every block, then one on every blog, who will have time to listen to Howard or Adam or Elmer Fudd? Hollywood's characters can't compete with the real characters in our lives. That's why Adam's trading us, the early podcasters, for the love of a big corp seems so utterly dumb. He had it, I was working for him for free, so were all of us, dammit. But this is what he wanted? Talk about snatching defeat from the mouth of victory.

Xeni Jardin is every bit as much a short-term mainstream animal as Adam and the reporter at News.Com. They've taken the blue pill, they're in the matrix, dumbing it down for job security and a chance for a career path, or at least another freelance job. We're on different sides. She calls me a dinosaur. I think that's a bit of wishful thinking. I'm one of the people, pretty defenseless against attacks from the press, but there are millions of me, eventually, if they trash us one by one, they'll run out of ink, and run out of advertisers to pay their salaries. We can't all be the flawed human beings they make me out to be.

I guess Adam will keep accelerating the lies, and the pro journos will keep reporting them. At some point it will be easy for me to say what Adam is afraid I might say. I tried recording a MCN about it yesterday, but decided not to run it. It didn't sound right, I was too angry. I have to wait for that to abate before telling the story.

Of course I could end up forgetting the story, but as long as he continues to say really nasty shit about me personally I don't think I will.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Don't forget there's a new PDA version of Scripting News. 

When accepting an offer to lead a discussion at a BloggerCon-style conference in the Deep South (Greensboro, NC; October 8), I responded, with tongue in cheek: "That's almost like asking the Boy Named Sue if he'd want to be reincarnated as a Boy Named Sue." 

Today's song: "I made me a vow to the moon and stars, that I'd search the honky-tonks and bars, and kill that man that give me that awful name." 

Tim Jarrett took notes at a recent speech by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 

Scoble: "When I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship." 

Matt Haughey: "The first thought that came into my head after hearing The New York Times will be adding paid subscription walls to their content was that Dave Winer just totally sealed the win on his bet." 

Steve Ballmer: "The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder." 

Iran Scan is an English-language blog covering the election in Iran.  

Tod Maffin is looking for someone who can write a script to turn an OPML file into HTML. Piece of cake for someone who knows how to write an outline renderer in Frontier (or Radio). Which reminds me, I should do a generic release of Frontier so people can download something for free to run random scripts. The current minimal install is pretty frightening. 

Thoughts on special feeds for bloggers, feed hosting services, podcast hosting services. 

Picture taken from my desk while skyping with Kosso. 

Okay, James Gosling isn't really this ignorant: "We hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project -- where just any old person could check in stuff -- they’d all freak." Okay James, you don't want to open source Java, so just say it. I could respect that. But this is totally wrong, and I can't believe you don't know it. No open source project exists that way. It would be chaos. How do you think Apache and Linux work? There's a priesthood and a cathedral, just like any commercial project, just like Java. What's different is that it could fork, so if the priesthood isn't productive a new priesthood can form. Often this is enough to keep the main thread moving along.  

I'm playing around today with a directory of podcasting directories. Nothing earth-shaking, just a couple of experiments.  

It's official. Scripting News is now part of Blogger. (Just kidding. Hehe.) 

Yesterday I took a Larry Lessig speech with me on my daily walk, but a funny thing happened when he played a very short track from the gray album, which is a mix of the black album which is a mix of the Beatles' white album -- I stopped and switched to listening to the white album which I also had on my Archos. Many thanks to Larry for making the suggestion. And a reminder that it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't take your entire music collection with you where ever you go. Someday I'm going to meet someone who won't understand how we could live that way, but we did, didn't we? 

Doc Searls: "The Marriott Marquis has a central cylinder of new elevators that rise and fall like bubbles on the surface of a reactor core." 

Cory Doctorow found a picture of a trailer suspended on a tower that looks like it was separated at birth from the windmill on my uncle's hippie commune here in Florida. 

Wired: "Traditionally, bands toured cities and played dive bars to create buzz about their music. But with MySpace, bands can host demos of their songs, announce shows and connect with fans without spending weeks on the road." 

The Podcast Outlaws Network is "a central place to find some of the brightest, funniest and most underrated Podcasts on the internet!" 

Jupiter Research is now podcasting. You may have trouble getting to the site, but if you persist you will eventually get through. 

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Steve Gillmor may be back on the air as soon as tonight. Yehi! The Gang can't be far behind. Happy days are here again. 

A late afternoon Morning Coffee Notes podcast (better late than never) about advertising in RSS, a vignette about the twisty world of 21st century radio, and an apology for the delay of the conversation-starters.  

We guessed that the talks at the Syndicate conference would be filled with ads, and based on reports on the web, we weren't wrong. They didn't like being talked about on my blog, but all I was doing is what I always do, think out loud and involve everyone in my drama. That, by the way, is how you build interest in an event and keep people thinking. This afternoon I told myself I need to get my head examined for trying to help big companies get their ideas exposure in the weblog world. In the end, they just freak out and try to extert control and you end up at the beach while everyone else is at the conference. Maybe I made out okay, but I do miss my friends -- this is a conference I should have been at. Oh well, life goes on.  

PublicRadioFeeds.com is "the most comprehensive list of public radio podcasts on the Internet." 

Billboard: Limbaugh Joins Podcasting Crowd. 

SF Chronicle: "Podcasters took over a San Francisco radio station Monday, replacing traditional radio personalities like Don Imus with a homespun potpourri of shows featuring independent musicians, martini-making and mortality." 

Google announces the beta of "AdSense for Feeds." 

Sorry we're going to have to wait 24 hours for the conversation-starters to start the conversations. There's a bit more coordinating here than I would like, but I guess a few more hours won't hurt.  

Two conversation-starters for Team RSS today. The first is a suggestion for browser-makers: Microsoft, Firefox, Safari, Opera, et al, on how to simplify the subscription process in a powerful way. It's an answer to the hodgepodge of different one-offs that have emerged that don't really work. This one does work, and is complete, imho. The second is a design for turning outlines into feeds, or is it feeds into outlines? It's both and a dessert topping and a floor wax! Stay tuned folks, I'll have a podcast and a couple of docs, it should be an exciting day.  

Peter Day: In Pod We Trust. 

About Newsweek 

I'm vaguely aware that Newsweek stepped in something as nasty as the stuff CBS stepped in last year. I'm catching it out of the corner of my eye as I scroll through my River of News aggregator on a day when I'm busy creating news instead of reading news.

I have a suggestion. Why don't we immediately assume that all press reports are at least as thinly sourced as the Newsweek story, and not make a big deal of it when we discover that one is. Instead, let's applaud the pros when they show evidence of diligence, multiple sourcing, and respect for what actually happened instead of what they think their editors will buy and what their readers will understand.

It's a new regime. Set expectations super-low. That way we can only be surprised by good news instead of bad. Make lemonade!

PS: Here's some synchronicity. I went looking for a picture of a lemon, and tripped over a picture of Cynsa Bonorris, who I worked with on the SF strike paper website in 1994, which I discuss below. She's part of a singing duet called Lemon Ju Ju. More godcasting for y'all.

It worked! 

I got a call yesterday from a San Francisco reporter doing a story on KYOU on their debut day. It was a very interesting and lively talk, reminding me a lot of the talks we'd have in the Bay Area at the end of 1994, when the web was taking root in so many communities, including the newspaper writers, who went on strike and needed a way to get their words out to their readers. It turns out that was how SFGate was started, the website of the Chronicle. Anyway, my first experience with the web was working on the strike paper website, alongside Chris Gulker who was working on the management website, both of us competing to bootstrap something new. I was learning from the news writers who "got" the web better than any of us, the same way a radio guy today is excited by podcasting. Of course the really good ones are excited, because podcasting is the realization of the reason so many of them got into broadcasting in the first place. Radio people are an idealistic bunch, just as newspaper writers are, in general. What happened to the idealistic newspaper writers? I wish I knew. Did they all die in the last eleven years? Have they all become web people? Did they wake up one day and realize this idealism was interfering with their career path? It'd be interesting to hear people's theories.

Anyway, it turns out someone at KYOU has a sense of humor, or a sense of what's appropriate, because yesterday, during the drive time commute, they ran a podcaster who records his casts during his commute! Think about it. What a turnabout. Instead of being stuck in traffic listening to a predictable formulaic format, or at best Morning Edition on NPR, now the bored listeners are doing the programming. This struck me as amazing. The podcasting revolution has completed its mission in some sense, in a remarkably short period of time.

Let me tell you a story that explains why I feel this way. A couple of years ago stuck in Boston traffic listening to a yet another WBUR pledge drive and thinking about technology that could turn this crap off for people like me who pay their NPR bill like a utility bill, I finally figured something out when the station manager, Jane Cristo, came on and said something that would be often repeated in the days ahead (my guess is that their marketing people decided it would be the theme of the pledge drive). This is your station, she said. You're the owners. We depend on your to pay the bills, that way we are only responsible to you, and blah blah blah and on and on, in the usual repetitive pledge drive way of doing things.

This got me thinking. If I own this place, what can I do with it? So when I got into work I called the offices of WBUR and asked to speak with Ms Cristo. When asked who's calling, I gave my name, Dave Winer, and my role -- owner of the station. No one got the joke.

I did get to speak with a vice-president, and I asked the question, what can I do with my ownership, and seriously don't you think you should stop saying that since it's total bullshit? He sent me a station prospectus, kind of an annual report, with some nice pictures, glossy and puffy, and numbers that meant nothing to me.

Thinking more about it I realized that the role of an owner of a public radio station is twofold. You listen and you pay. Occasionally, if you don't mind waiting and getting totally nervous, you can call in and ask a question of an expert -- someone who is probably just saying politically correct bullshit, but you never get to speak, what you think isn't important, your job is to pay, and if you like, listen, while they lull you to sleep with their relaxing talk that's only intelligent when compared to the other crap that's on the radio.

So yesterday when I heard about the commuter musing about his mortality during drivetime while other San Franciscans were caught in the horrible traffic in the Bay Area, I let out a satisfied chuckle. I had lived long enough. I could now die a happy man. As they say in Apache Land when an install is successfully completed: It worked!

Monday, May 16, 2005

Chris Pirillo has an interview with Nick Bradbury about the deal with Newsgator. I guess it's official now. I was briefed on the deal by Nick Bradbury a couple of days ago. I understand that the motivation was to allow FeedDemon to tie into the subscription-sharing network Newsgator is building. It seems inevitable that they'll buy a Mac news reader product, they would probably like to buy NetNewsWire, and it would be hard to imagine Brent wouldn't take a reasonable offer (I have no inside knowledge). This is venture capital at work, not sales revenue. I ima