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Monday, October 31, 2005MarketWatch: Microsoft to push into Web software. Today's developments in OPML-land.
I was observed live-blogging at TagCamp on Saturday. Another interesting OPML feed, this one is dynamic, in that it changes every day to point back in time to Scripting News on this day in 2004, 2003, 2002, etc. Seattle Mind Camp is a camp-like event, following in the tradtition of BarCamp, and this weekend's TagCamp in Palo Alto. They have an OPML feed listing the RSS feeds of the participants, which I've included in the Community Directory in the right margin on Scripting News. Kevin Burton on the OPML Validator.
Sunday, October 30, 2005What if Scooter Libby were a guest on Law & Order? Scoble, before the XML geeks swoop down and start picking this to death, the point is that, as a non-technical user, you're right to insist that RSS work well for your users. You want to provide them with full feeds, you want to be able to view your feed, and have some idea of what's going on when you look. That's what I get from your message. Weird things like CDATA, while they're valid and definitely not funky (in a technical sense) are confusing. I support you in what you want, although other techies will say there's no reason for the technology to be transparent to you, I disagree. People don't use things they don't understand, and it's certainly possible to do it in a way that you can understand, without giving up any of the power and depth that geeks like so much. I'd also be happy to work with Matt to make you happy. I'm pretty sure I know what you want. Keep on truckin. Dave Pito Salas on his experience with the OPML Validator. Linux World: "Just as the inventor of the automobile doubtless had no intention of facilitating the one-night stand, neither did Dave Winer set out to foment Reckless, Stupid Syndication." We need a beautiful icon for valid OPML. Norm Augustinus has some good OPML badge material! Amyloo has an animated badge for OPML. Nice. Kosso's is the prettiest so far. Every once in a while I remind people that there's a PDA version of Scripting News. Nick Bradbury's comments on the OPML Validator. Mike Arrington's first podcast, recorded at TagCamp. I had trouble sleeping last night, so I stayed up to watch the clock go from 1:59AM to 1AM on my Mac. Maybe I couldn't sleep because I watched Monster's Ball, an excellent movie that started on death row, but in the end was a beautiful romance about redemption and forgiveness. Excellent acting by Halle Berry, believe it or not. Highly recommended. Okay, another thing I did while I couldn't sleep was buy a new toy at apple.com. A dual CPU, 2.3Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB drive, 23 inch cinema display. About $5K. It should be a pretty nice computer. And I deserve it. The people of the pod Cyrus Farivar (pronounced suh-roos far-ih-var), the author of the original NY Times podcasting piece, reminds us that Anne Eisenberg's From Your Living Room was the fourth NY Times piece on podcasting. True, but it's still a good thing that they ran it, because it's getting closer to the real story of podcasting, the people of the pod. Look at who they wrote about. Not Tod Maffin, but his wife Kim who is podcasting about MS, and providing comfort and information to thousands of people who are afflicted with the disease. Lisa Williams, who did the kickass tutorial about podcasting, and does a weekly show about the meals she prepares for her Watertown family (Lisa is a regular at the Berkman Thursday group, we've worked together a bunch of times). Michael Geoghegan, a largely unsung hero of podcasting, who does an excellent movie review podcast, Reel Reviews. Eisenberg set out to learn how people make media that was previously thought to only be accessible to corporations with millions of dollars to invest. While Cyrus wrote the initial milestone piece, announcing the exciting beginning of a new technology with potential to become a medium, which, in a very short period, has. Even so, next year, and the year after, we will have to take another look at where podcasting is, and let's hope the Times continues to run a string of insightful slices in time that give us a realistic look. Even the Markoff puff piece about Silicon Valley's visions of podcasting profit, was worth it, in hindsight, if only to see the Times getting back on course with this piece about the people of podcasting. Emphatically, we are not a get-rich-quick scheme for serial entrepreneurs looking to flip their pre-IPO Web 2.0 Ajax web-app bubble-ware for the Long Tail. We are people with hearts, lives, families, aspirations, hope and something to say. That's by far the more interesting story, and it has legs, it's going somewhere, unlike the tail, which is a vestige of times gone by, when you could count on people to be idiotic couch potatoes, ready to be harvested by advertisers with their intrusive and mindless "messages." The baby of the pod When I was in Toronto in July, I had dinner with Shannon and Ray Slakinski. Ray is co-author of iPodderX, one of the first podcasting clients for the Macintosh (and now Windows too). Shannon was visibly pregnant and due in November. Aidan McLaughlan Slakinski was born on Oct 23, a few weeks early. Here are some pictures of the baby and the proud family.
Saturday, October 29, 2005In tomorrow's NY Times: "I love podcasting because it turns us all into investigative journalists of our own lives." "Investigative journalists of our own lives" was something I was saving for a special occasion, and I think Anne Eisenberg did a great job, and it was especially nice to have my parents included in the story because the podcast I did with them is one of our favorites. It's a family thing, and that's what makes the new medium so great, you can experience things here that you can't experience anywhere else. It turns us all, if we want it to, into media hackers. An update to the OPML validator to fix a bug, a new test case, and the beginning of a roadmap. Great pic of Mike Arrington. Rohit shares his philosophy of mail lists. Great teeth! Adam Marsh explains the Long Tail in a graph about tags. Biz Stone explains what it's like working at Google. Tara explains Riya, but try not to look (stare) at her T-shirt. Dalton Caldwell talks with Rohit Khare about semi-permeable blogs and podcasting. Next Mac question. Can I configure iPhoto to write selected pictures to a folder? That's the key to my CMS. Or maybe there's a command that does it? The "Long Tail" makes me want to barf. I'm not in anyone's tail. I'm a head, a heart, if I must choose an organ, kidneys or lungs. Anyone who calls bloggers a tail of anything has his head up his ass. Anita Wilhelm in the spirit of TagCamp. Dave McClure is pimping SimplyHired.com. Danah Boyd pauses for lunch at the camp. Rohit Khare is complaining that the picture I took of him in Amsterdam is not the number one hit for his name. Denny's has excellent free wifi. Next Mac question. Where do you get the codec needed to get the QuickTime player to play AVIs? I'm going to be at TagCamp again this morning. Last night was fun, lots of old familiar faces. Funny that Computerware has been replaced with a Quiznos. I guess there's something symbolic about that, but I don't know what it is. Kin Rowan takes a look at the OPML Validator Beta. A bunch of comments on the validator, bugs reported. Hey we're having a Old Farts Genius Network breakfast at Denny's in Palo Alto, tomorow at 9:30AM. You don't have to be a club member to join the party. Don't forget to turn your clocks back tomorrow morning.
Friday, October 28, 2005Okay, here's the first beta of my OPML Validator. I've been crunching on the validator to announce in time for the Tagcamp meetup, tonight, in Palo Alto. It looks like I made it. Hey! We're back in business. Now this one is very very geeky, but much in demand. Guaranteed to be popular. But it's beta, that means you shouldn't depend on the results. "Nice and easy does it, every time," sings Shirley Horne. Photos from last night's Nashville blogger meetup. I saw this iPod vending machine on Concourse A in Atlanta's airport, and like Gizmodo, I wondered how it would work. Buy a blank iPod just in time to hop on a flight? Hmmm. Maybe it'll make sense when they come up with a wifi-capable iPod, because the wifi on Concourse A is pretty good, especially near that machine. Dave Slusher: "The only people I ever hear talking about how the public won't listen to anything but slick programming are people that produce slick programming." Amyloo is impressed with VeriSign. Mike Arrington's new stream Most of you know Mike as the editor of TechCrunch, a phenomenal new weblog that tells the story of new web services, written from the heart of SiliconValley. I met him for the first time in a meeting in NY, in May, when we got together to talk about the sale of weblogs.com. Today Mike starts a new blog, called CrunchNotes by telling the story of how TechCrunch got started. He credits me with being an inspiration, and if it's really true, he's taken it so far and done it so well, all the credit belongs to him. Really. What he says is so true. Too many software developers wander into the market without knowing what's been tried before, what worked, what didn't. Often the users know more about the history of the category than the designer of the software. What Mike does, by writing up every product and service that he sees, is the beginning of a process that we must develop; but is itself a revisit of something that used to be done thoroughly and systematically, but because of the quick pace of boom and bust in the tech business, is an art that now needs to be reinvented, a bootup that's actually a reboot. Mike is a lawyer. Laws have precedents. When it was thought that Harriet Miers believed in a constitutional right to privacy, many inferred that she was a choice advocate. One position implies another because legal decisions are based on previous decisions. Sometimes a higher court changes direction and overturns a precedent, this is necessary because the context changes over time. It's true in technology too. In 1985 we designed software to run in 640K; today my machine had more than 500 times that amount of memory, but in order to make it run adequately, I had to double it. Laws that made sense in 1985 clearly need another look in 2005. In software, I call this system of precedents design by prior art. To really make it work, we need to go back and scour the past for lost art. It's not enough to just chronicle what's coming online now (although I'm glad we're doing that). Maybe the next step is for Mike and I to visit Michael Miller, who, as editor-in-chief of InfoWorld and then PC Mag (where he still is, I believe) put in place a system for looking at software over time. That was a system of prior art in software. There's another reason it's a good idea to study the past in software -- anything that was designed or implemented before software patents forms a prior art defense against the patent system of the 21st century. Mike, being both a lawyer and a student of technology, is in a great position to lead us here. In any case, congratulations to my friend Mike, for doing this work so well. It's great when someone so talented and motivated finds something that suits him so well. How lucky for him, but then we're lucky too, because we get the full benefit of his brilliance, without having to do the work!
Thursday, October 27, 2005Is there a way to run Mac OS 9 apps on Mac OS X?
Tagcamp is tomorrow and Saturday in Palo Alto. I think I'll book a room in Palo Alto and go hang out with the campers. Maybe I'll provide the music. "Go to the mirror boy!" For 18 points, guess the significance of the location. Kevin Burton: "Here's one of the things that bothers me about AJAX." 1/4/01: "In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don't have to share it with anyone, it's yours and yours alone. It would be fast!" BBC: "People are underestimating what Microsoft is doing with search technology, says Bill Gates." Harriet Miers withdraws Just heard this on NPR. Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a Supreme Court nominee. Fascinating. Can't wait to see how Bush moves. AP story on MSNBC. Science, art, voodoo and luck Ben and Mena Trott explain why they're having performance trouble on their Typepad service. Maybe our theory about putting the content management on the workstation wasn't so bad after all. That's the approach Radio took in 2002. After a while it became clear people preferred to have someone else manage the content management for them. I'm sure SixApart will get the problems sorted out, but no one should underestimate how hard it is to keep a service like TypePad running as it's growing. I sure don't, having lived with EditThisPage.com and Weblogs.com. Scaling is a science, an art, voodoo, and more than a little luck, as Ben's story reveals. Perfect OPML I've been working with John Roberts at CNET to make his OPML perfect. All the attributes conform to the validation guidelines, and work perfectly with the OPML Editor. Faster Mac In yesterday's thread where I explored buying a new Mac with a dozen awesome Mac experts. Brian Criscuolo found a way to make my current Mac perform as it was designed to. Here's what I did that made the difference: 1. Create a new user with full Administrator priviledges. 2. Log off. Log on as the new user. 3. Do some stuff. 4. Log off. Log on as the old user. Voila. Fast Mac! Zzzzzip. Amazing. I kind of thought this was an easy to use computer? Oh well. Verdens beste blogger Okay I have no idea what this means, but a big site in Norway thinks Scripting News belongs on a list of ten blogs (pretty good company). Jack Foster Mancilla translates: "The Worlds best blogs. Blogs have taken over the net, and many of them are among the worlds largest websites. See are all the best here, and make your own." About Scripting News: "This blog is written by Dave Winer, an is one of the most influential tech-blogs in the world. Dave Winer is some times a controversia figure, but at the same time he is deeply respected." I asked Jack for context. "This particular article is using the blogs mentioned as examples, for a purpose. TV2 has just launched Nettblogg. That will give everyone who wants one, a free blog space. The good articles from these blogs will be published on the NetAvisen website as real articles."
Wednesday, October 26, 2005Nashville blogger meetup, tomorrow, 5:30PM. A funny bit about White Sox baseball from a Cubs fan. It's something like what a Mets fan might say about the Yankees, except a Mets fan would never, ever, ever root for the Yankees. It could never happen. A fate worse than death! I'm listening to Richard Clarke on Fresh Air. He's fantastic. They should give him his own show. Okay I give up. It's time to buy a new Mac, something in the $3-$5K range. I think I want a desktop. Tell me what to buy, and I'll order it today! I got 9/10 correct on the 8th grade math test. Good thing cause I skipped 8th grade. Next Tues, Nov 1, Microsoft is briefing press and analysts on a new strategy. The two presenters are Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie. Thanks for the invite, I'll be there. Registration is open for Podcastercon, January 7, in Chapel Hill, NC. I signed up and donated $100. The Podcasters In Leather 2006 calendar. Internet Identity Workshop today and tomorrow in Berkeley. Right in the neighborhood. These things really need to get publicized better. First I heard about it was yesterday, and I subscribe to the blogs of a couple of the organizers. Weird.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005CNET has an OPML feed for its top 100 blogs. I've linked it in to the box in the right margin.
Yahoo is looking for an RSS product manager. Play an accordion, go to prison. That's the law! I had a really cool idea. I'm going to open a service called Elgoog that scrapes every page on Google and displays it without their ads. Of course to pay for the service I'm going to have to insert my own ads. Fair is fair. Google can opt out if they insist (how clueless can you get) but they have to send a lawyer over to my house and once a lawyer has been used to opt out for one page, that's it, if you want to opt out for another page, you need to send over another lawyer. And if Google complains, I'm going to make the lawyers come over naked, and I won't let Sergey and Larry come to FU Camp. Of course no lawyers are needed if they get with the program and let me have all their content for free and don't whine about it too much. Stanford Daily report on podcasting. Niall Kennedy took a closeup of my Archos while it was recording last night's Morning Coffee Notes. Kaboodle is "the easiest way to get all your web choices on one page!" Dare Obasanjo: "Google is multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation. However whenever its executives speak, they do an excellent job of portraying the company as if it is the altruistic side project of a bunch of geeky college kids." Sleight of hand Watch Alex Macgillivray's hands carefully in this quote from a Wired News piece today. "The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in," said Alex Macgillivray, an attorney at Google. Of course, that makes sense, you nod your head, how true, but then you realize that the analogy doesn't work. If card catalogs were as good at selling books as Google claims Google Print will be, they'd batch-submit all their publications using the marvel of computer technology (they know how to write scripts in NY too, or in a pinch, they can hire a wizard from California). No one has to "come by" in the age of the Internet. How quaint. And misleading. The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out. (And, have they explained how opt-out works?) Maybe the publishers want to operate their own search engine? After all, they did pay the authors advances on royalties, and marketed the books, they have a major investment in the books, and Google has no investment at all. (I was reminded of this perspective listening to Tim O'Reilly's NerdTV interview, where he explains why his books aren't freely available, as Richard Stallman insists they should be.) Anyway, like any sleight of hand, the trick is to get you to focus on what's least relevant, and ignore what is most relevant. Another perspective Can you imagine that Steve Jobs got the music companies to let him build the iTunes music store with the kind of legal strong-arm tactics that Google is using with the publishing industry? Second question. If Google prevails, what's to stop them from doing the same with the music industry? I don't doubt for a moment that Google is on a path to compete with Apple in this area. How convenient it would be for them if they didn't have to listen to the music industry. We live in interesting times, folks.
Monday, October 24, 2005Geek dinner tonight in Berkeley, 7:45PM. Mike Kaltschnee: "I post anything I find interesting, and it turns out 100,000 people a month find it interesting, too." 37 Signals: "Google has reintroduced their Google Web Accelerator with a vengeance. It was evil enough the first time around, but this time it's downright scary." Tim O'Reilly: "It's too bad that we can't have a real debate about ideas, rather than cynical rhetoric that creates heat without shedding much light." Niall Kennedy explains how Google supports spam bloggers. Lots of links to yesterday's rambling rant on Silicon Valley.
Sunday, October 23, 2005Listening to Meet the Press today, it's fairly clear that Karl Rove and others will be indicted. A Republican senator, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, was spinning like this: Innocent until proven guilty. She hopes the charges aren't perjury or obstruction of justice, the kind of charges (she says) that you file when you can't prove your primary case. Those also happen to be the charges that President Clinton was impeached on, funny how standards change, eh. Democrat Art Schumer said he would accept whatever the prosecutor decided to do. Sounds reasonable, if you assume he's not partisan, but of course everything he says is totally partisan. So he knows the indictments are coming. This week it was exceptionally easy to read the tea-leaves. The conference website for this week's invite-only Google Zeitgeist conference. If you have a password for the site that you'd like to share, I'd love to take a look. Right now, it's closed. I also sent an email to Google asking for access to the site. Hey if you never ask they can never say yes. Like a BloggerCon In her writeup, Sylvia Paull compares Friday's BBQ to early BMUG meetings. If Woz were there, he might compare it to the Homebrew club that met at Stanford in the early days of the PC. We all have our points of reference. To me, it was like the first BloggerCon. But all these events have something important in common, something that's very much like the web, they are inclusive and open to all. How ironic that a conference called Web 2.0 was invite-only. It's so un-weblike to say who can come and who can't. That's not what the web says. It says anyone can come. Even so, there is a price of admission. To get to the BBQ, or the Homebrew Club, BMUG or BloggerCon, you had to have a ride. To get on the web you have to have a computer and a net connection.
My experience with these shows is that if you trust the universe, it will take good care of you. In all three cases, exactly the right number of people showed up. Every seat was filled, a few people had to stand, there were enough lunches, lively discussions, all the goals were achieved. Now we didn't get people who only come when an event is invite-only, but I say that's good! Those people don't come because they love ideas and want to learn and share, they come for other reasons and they change the character of the event, not in a good way, imho. People who come to open events are true web people -- there's no difference between 1.0 or 2.0 -- it's a constant. You come, like Enoch Choi, to share his story of helping people in a destroyed city (it's a geek story, surprisingly, and a smart one). You come because your three-person startup is achieving success and has big plans for the future, and you want to tell people about how excited you are to be creating something useful, beautiful and empowering. You come because you're young and happy to be alive. Or old and happy to see all the happy young people. You come because this is the good stuff. You come because this is totally 1.0. This is why I came to Silicon Valley in 1979, when I was 24 years old. In Madison there were people writing software, smart people (some) but I wanted to make software at a different level. I wanted to make stuff that changed everything, that opened closed doors, that gave people power that used to only belong to the rich and old. Like an open conference, I needed to give something up to get there. But there was no gatekeeper at the door to Silicon Valley telling me I needed an invite. The door was open because not only is that a value of the web, but it's also a value of Silicon Valley, even if some people usurp that. Later this week Google will have their invite-only Zeitgeist conference. It's as closed as a conference can be. And this is the company we lifted on our shoulders and held up as a shining example of the web at its best. We were wrong to do that, but forgive us for having hope. At some core level Google did understand the web, but there was also a lot about Google that was against the web, and now that's most of what they are. This is the struggle we are constantly dealing with in the tech business. For a while we send up a beacon, a shining star, and it's exciting! Then they forget their values, where they came from, what made it work for them, and we follow them down into bad years. You'd think we could learn, but apparently we can't. Now can we survive their downfall? That's a good question, and one I don't know the answer to. The excitement today has an element of panic to it. In our gut we can see that the growth is likely to end almost before it gets started. We see Google doing what we knew in our hearts they would do, pick fights with powerful industries that we have nothing against. The publishing industry has done more to support my vision that Google ever has, in fact Google has fought me, at a petty, immature level, based on being incompatible, if you can imagine that, where the publishing industry adopted RSS as-is, without trying to change it or break it. They say the publishers are clueless, I think it's Google's management that desperately needs to find its place in the world. I criticize the NY Times, god knows they deserve it, but when I call Martin Nisenholtz, he takes the call, and we work together, in productive ways. This is the east coast way of doing things. It's something Silicon Valley, which is run by immature men, needs to learn. We don't have to agree on everything to work together. In fact we must work together, and honor our differences with respect. There is cause for hope. Google isn't the only act in town. Yahoo could challenge their dominance. I hope they do, and I hope they don't do it by being like Google. Embrace the world instead of picking fights with it. Work together because it's the right thing to do and because it's good for business. Point off-site, share the flow, come to BBQs and BloggerCons, know that the bright eyes of happy independent developers are the source of the ideas that drive this place, and make sure there's always a sense that this place is come as you are, no invite required and totally 1.0 Dowd vs Miller Like Jeff Jarvis, I read Maureen Dowd's column about NY Times reporter Judith Miller in yesterday's paper. I have a few (blunt) comments. 1. This is why the Times needs a blogger columnist on its op-ed page, to catch situations like this long before they melt down at the level the Miller case has melted down. And I don't mean a columnist with a blog, I mean a blogger who is given regular space on the op-ed page. 2. If you think this is an unusual situation for the Times, think again. We know that at least some Times reporters aren't actually reporters any more than Miller was, they have the hubris to think they should shape the events they cover, that their point of view is what matters. I tried in so many ways to explain this at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard in January of this year, but the Times editorial people, as always, dismiss this criticism with arrogance. This is going to cause more problems in the future. People outside of the Times can see the problem more clearly than your insiders can. 3. Bravo to Dowd for seeing that her position can help the Times by getting them to think. 4. Please publish her op-ed outside the firewall (try the front page) so we can point to it.
Saturday, October 22, 2005For 25 points, who was Jim "Mad Money" Cramer's college roommate? We're having a geek dinner in Berkeley on Monday evening, October 24, 7:45PM at Fellini's on University and Acton, to honor our guest from up north, Robert Scoble. Click here to RSVP. Tara Hunt got a picture of me with Mike Arrington. If you look closely you'll see my fly is open. (Actually you don't have took that closely.) I've gotten a few requests for an MP3 of my talk last night. If you know of a recording, please let me know. People were surprised last night to find out that I own tagcamp.com and tagsr.us. It turns out Matt owns blogsr.us. I suggested we do a JV, with Bessemer capitalizating an LBO of SixApart and Technorati. We all had a good laugh. Using simple arithmetic, Cringely illustrates how exuberant Google and its competitors are. "That's a heck of a lot of ads," says he. Jake Savin explains how UserLand's products implement OPML. Last night's TechCrunch meetup in at Mike Arrington's was awesome. There were easily 200 people there. Incredible energy. Very Gnomedexish. I gave a kickass keynote if I do say so myself.
Friday, October 21, 2005Keynote: Build to flip the Flickr of evrything. Carmine Gallo: "If you truly want to capture the hearts and minds of your listeners, then maintain eye contact during your presentation, talk, or speech." Matt Mullenweg is leaving CNET and going out on his own. I hope to see him tonight at the TechCrunch BBQ, and we're having dinner one night next week. I've got a bunch of ideas for things we can do together.
Wired News takes a look at Memorandum. Of course I discovered the article on Memorandum, which tempts me not to point to it, unless I have something to say. Now having said it, I can stop, because no doubt Memeorandum will link to this witless and information-less post and at the same time will move the Wired News article up the ladder. Meanwhile, my ultra-witty keynote, above, which has only been linked to by TechCrunch (calling it The Flickr of Keynotes), didn't make the grade on Memeorandum at all. I could have sent out emails asking for links and it probably would have shown up, but that seems really tacky. One more thing, people complain the site is too ugly, and there should be a sports version, I have another complaint. The name has too many syllables and it's hard to remember how to spell it, and it's too long, and screws up word-wrap on my posts. Here's a deep probing question. Would people be happier with Flock if it were called Flockr? And am I spamming Memeorandum right now, as I type this? One more question. Is Flock the Flickr of Flocks? Open Media Summit: "By invitation only." Open? Tom Friedman has a fantastic column today in the NY Times about podcasting in China. It's not about making people rich, it's about enabling the people to create media, a very 21st century thing. I can't point to Friedman's column because it's behind a very 20th century for-pay firewall. BTW, congratulations to Evan Williams for finally figuring out that the main significance of podcasting is not that it gives a new channel to commercial broadcasters (which it does), but rather it allows people to create media (see above). My guess is that this epiphany was brought about by a 20-million-ton frieght train called iTunes. Ross Rader advises that Jon Postel died on Oct 16, not the 19th.
Thursday, October 20, 2005Ernie the Attorney is back in New Orleans. Editorial: A turning point for the web? I haven't said anything as Google moved into indexing printed books, but as their spin campaign took shape, my opinion formed. We must realize that Google is no longer the little company we used to love. They're now a huge company that pushes individuals around like a lot of other huge companies. They need some balance to their power. It's ridiculous to blindly take their side on every issue. Sometimes they're wrong, and I believe this is one of those times. Ryan Tate on search engine architecture. Vikas Karmat: "Librarians are typically female, typically are well read, have good English language skills, and typically underpaid. The programmers are typically male, typically have poor writing skills, spell poorly, and are overpaid." Interesting. Now I know why I like librarians so much. Let's see. Yes, I am male. I think I write fairly well, and I have almost-perfect spelling. Until a few weeks ago I'd have said I was grossly underpaid, but then I had a really nice payday, so I don't get to complain about that anymore. A tear and a cheer Today marks the passing of an era, in a way. In late 1999, I wrote an application called subhonker2, that caused some stir in the then-tiny blogging world. I got an email from Wes Felter saying people were freaking because one of my servers was checking their sites every hour or so (or sometimes more often, the code had bugs, of course). That was the very first incarnation of what was to become weblogs.com. Between then and now there have been dozens of releases of the software, as the network of weblogs grew to thousands and then hundreds of thousands and millions of blogs. And now today, it's not running on my servers at all! I imagine this is how parents feel when a kid finally reaches college age and leaves home. All of a sudden it's a lot quieter around here. Anyway, the three special sub-domains still point where they're supposed to. audio.weblogs.com is showing new podcasts. It looks like VeriSign did a good transition. As we say here when things fall into place: Bing! Sphere pass 1 It's really hard to review a search engine if I can't point to results of queries. Hmmm. Maybe I can. This morning I did a search on "Wilma" in the last day. It's a breaking story, twenty four hours ago it was a tropical storm, since then it has become the largest storm ever observed. Pretty amazing transition. What did the blogosphere have to say about that? This is the question that Sphere claims to answer, because it is a blog search engine. I saved the search result to a local folder and uploaded it so you can look at it, even if you don't have access to the beta site. At the same time, the Politics page on Memeorandum gives a view into the Wilma story in blogs, but not just blogs, the top item that glues the category together is a NY Times article. Anyhow, here's the conclusion. I don't want specialized search engines, I want better search engines. That's the nature of search, I want to go one place, ask a question and have the network do the searching. The more places I have to go the less it's search. Think about it. Perhaps Google and the other major SEs should have some kind of plug-in architecture that lets us build our own search engine out of components we like. Then I could add Sphere to MSN, or Mememorandum to Yahoo search, and they could do their magic without being bought by one or the other. This is a time when "build to flip" may be a viable strategy, until we get an architecture for searching, assuming it's actually possible to do one. I've heard from developers inside the SEs that such an architecture is impossible. Maybe so, or maybe just for SEs that were built before architecture was a requirement (assuming it is one now). How to get more women I know that's a provocative title, but I have an idea, a possible solution to a problem that women of our industry raise often and passionately -- how to get more women in leadership positions, not just a few, but a good balance to the men. Sylvia asks this question in a post on her blog yesterday, which started an interesting thread. Here's the idea. Let's find industries whose conferences are horribly un-gender-balaced the other way (mostly women, almost no men) and consider merging with them. For example, what's the intersection between Web 2.0 and librarians? (Assuming most librarians are women.) If we find one that works, that's the begining of a gender-balanced tech industry. Have a conference where we discuss the confluence of technology and librarians (I'm sure there are already such conferences, how many tech industry people go to them?) Are there conferences where they bemoan the lack of men? Interesting question. I can't imagine the men complaining too much about it, actually. In any case, I suspect most men in the tech industry would be happy to have more women. Believe it or not, many of us like women. There's nothing more dull than a conference with 100 men and 2 women. You need a good mix to keep things interesting. The Greensboro blogging conference earlier this month was more interesting because there were far more black people there than I've ever seen at a tech industry conference. How did this happen? They chose North Carolina A&T, a state college that's largely black, to host the event. The professors and students were all black, as were many participants of the community. There's a big lesson in that. If you want change, like Dorothy, you have to leave Kansas, you can't expect change to come to you, you have to go there. BTW, there's a pretty constant flamer in the comments in Sylvia's post, someone who acts like she knows me (she hasn't got a clue), and says some pretty bad things. I'm pointing anyway, lest you think (as my pal Amyloo does) that women behave better than men on the net. My experience is that women can be pretty nasty to men on the net. Maybe we should try to counteract some of that too. As I said some men genuinely like women, and if you're a pro-woman woman, it seems you should support that. Of course I'll probably be attacked for saying that too, but what the heck. Namaste y'all!
Wednesday, October 19, 2005There are hotels in New Orleans taking reservations for later this month. I had a thought that I might travel there for a few days, with a camera, to see for myself what's going on. I wonder how crazy that idea is. I got a demo of Sphere today, and have a password to access the test site. I haven't had a chance yet to formulate an opinion about it. They're going to be at the TechCrunch BBQ on Friday night, where, btw, I will keynote. Yes, it's kind of strange to have a keynote speaker at a BBQ, but these are strange times! (And strange is gooood.)
Hurricane Wilma will turn toward south Florida on a path to Camden in time for PopTech. Scoble will be my guest in Berkeley early next week. I bet that means there will be an East Bay geek dinner, maybe two. On this day in 1998, Jon Postel died. Sylvia Paull wonders where the women were at Web 2.0. Mike Arrington picks the top five venture capitalists who invest in new web companies. Rex Hammock: "No Joi Ito?" 11:30AM: I installed another 500MB memory on my iBook G4. Good news, it didn't miss a single keystroke in the last sentence. It does fall behind (something no 2005 Windows machine does, sorry guys, just reporting the facts here), but whew, it's much better, so far, knock wood, praise Murphy, I am not an attorney, etc. Alex Barnett: 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for OPML. Apparently I went on a train ride today in Italia with my friend Paolo. I bet we were sitting in the smoking section. (Postscript: I'd lose the bet. Paolo says Italia has quit smoking.) Lots of email on the bit below. I'll try getting some more memory for my iBook G4. I don't even know how to pop the lid on one of these babies. (Turns out popping the lid is easy. There are tabs to the right of the Esc key and to the left of F12. Squeeze them both at the same time and the keyboard pops off.) A step by step guide with pictures to upgrade RAM on an iBook G4. Chris Pirillo chooses uTorrent over Azureus as his Windows BitTorrent client. Five years ago on this day, a dinner with Ed Cone and Brent Simmons yields a story about transcendental money. It's funny because Brent now is much closer to having TM (he may actually have it, I don't really know) and Ed, after writing the Wired piece he was researching, went on to be the founder of the Greensboro blogging community, which has become so powerful that it can now host a conference (which I just participated in, at the same time Brent was making his TM). It seems the three of us may be in a common eddy in the River of Life. Amyloo questions the math in my post about morons and idiots on mail lists and wikis. She makes some good points. Charles Cooper cites it as gospel. Can you go 18 hours without food? I went for colonoscopy number two yesterday, the first was five years ago. From this point I'll be a regular at the surgery center. Not much to say about it, the procedure itself takes 20 minutes, and you're so pumped with sedative that you don't even notice it, except at first it's a little painful. They say the worst part is the prep, and it's pretty gross and takes a long time, but you can do it, and I don't think it's really the worst part, which is the moment when they tell you if they found anything. But for me, even that's not so bad. I've already been through the worst of that, three years ago, and survived. Maybe someday the news will be "There's no treatment for what you have, settle up your affairs." Then, I hope I can do it with the grace and humor that Warren Zevon showed, singing "My ride's here." One thing that was great was that all the doctors, nurses and attendants, except for one, were women. I never felt so cared for, and totally enjoyed all the attention. And the one guy there, an orderly who wheeled me out, was one of the happiest guys you'll ever meet. No surprise there. Again, I noticed that people who spend all day every day helping others have the best jobs in the world. I think humans were designed to help each other, and when that's all we do, we're happy. Programming on an empty stomach I rented a bunch of movies, but only watched one, Spanglish, which I enjoyed a lot. I'm a sucker for romantic comedy, and this one is funny and sweet and the main characters are a ton of fun, all of them, and there are lots. I guess I knew I'd like it when I saw that it was directed by the same guy who did As Good As It Gets, which is one of my all-time favorites. I also rented Motorcycle Diaries, which I'll watch as soon as I finish my mid-night posting. You'd think programming without any food might be a bit hard, given that programming is accomplished by shutting out all real-world distractions, and a grumbling stomach and a mind thinking every moment of raiding the fridge, or driving to Togo's, would make it hard to focus on the ones and zeros, but not so, it turns out. I did some great work while fasting and making quick runs to the loo. All this programming made me realize that I need a faster machine. This iBook G4 isn't really fast enough for email and it totally sucks for programming. Mac users like to say that CPU speeds on the Mac aren't comparable to those on Windows, but they should try Windows sometime. The machines are so much faster. Which is to say that an entry-level Mac is unacceptably slow. It literally misses keystrokes while I'm typing. Makes creative writing a slow process, and makes programming more error-prone (which is the last thing you need). Regardless, I like the user interface enough that I'm willing to throw some money at the problem. Not sure if I should buy a desktop or a new high speed laptop, and I really like the iBook form factor, it's rugged and attractive. But the machine is ridiculously slow.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005Northwest Airlines supports RSS. Mike Arrington announces a TechCrunch party this Friday in Atherton. I'll be there for sure. Nick Bradbury discusses the Reading Lists idea. Podcastercon is on for Jan 7 in Chapel Hill, NC.
Don Park: " I can't help wondering how Technorati determines whether a blog is fake or not."
Monday, October 17, 2005Mike Graves on the (now announced) VeriSign acquisition of Moreover. He also posted tech notes on the switch to their server for weblogs.com which will take place on Thursday (it's still running on one of my servers). A must-read for developers who ping. PaidContent's Staci Kramer interviewed execs from VeriSign and Moreover. Fortune profile of BitTorrent's Bram Cohen. Doc Searls says we've got a monoculture problem, and we need to look beyond Google to solve the link-spam problem. But which Google? The one that's the source of the link-spam or the destination? Even if it doesn't have their full attention yet, it will when (what Steve Gillmor cleverly calls) Brin-rank stops working. The first destinations that broke aren't Google's. But they're the goal of the spammers who probably don't care very much about Feedster or PubSub. The prize is Google. I need to do a podcast to explain in more detail how Google has spent the last five years walking out on a very long plank, one that has certainly generated many billions of 20th Century style dollars, by monetizing eyeballs, and how precarious their position is. An empire based on the sanctity of the link. Intrusive ads, the ones that Google sells, are so so tired. Feeds containing commercial information people want, are wired. Cristian Vidmar on OPML reading list scenarios. OFGN gets a mention on Ben Barren's. Julian Bond did an OPML browser in PHP. Here's how it displays the Scripting News directory in the box in the right margin, which of course, is an OPML file. Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira and Brian Benzinger on OPML reading lists. Worse is Better : "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." Four years ago today I won the Wired tech geek of the year award for SOAP. This DaveNet piece, written in July 1998, contained the germ of the idea. A lot of what people call Web 2.0 today is in this piece written over seven years ago at the beginning of the previous bubble. Did you know there was even a mascot for this stuff? Seriously. (Well, actually not seriously.)
Sunday, October 16, 2005A tiny change makes the Mac versions of Firefox and the OPML Editor work together. The Shanghai Daily supports RSS. Nick Bradbury's Web 2.01 release notes.
Terry Heaton is facing surgery without insurance and has a surprising story to tell about it. We take care of each other when the need is great. That's why the world works, most people are good, most of the time, and adversity often brings out the best in us. The always-quotable Chris Pirillo: "Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm..." Tim Bray: "We have an emergency on our hands." Taskable is a "new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." I predict the TechCrunch guys will really like Taskable, it's the Flickr of Windows toolbar gadgets. (BTW, Sean, it's called inclusion, not transclusion.) Amyloo is trying Taskable and offers an idea for the Great RSS Icon Debate. Reminds me of a question Staci Kramer, another OPML blogger asked a week ago. Why isn't her OPML blog showing up in various places you'd think it would show up. Turns out I forgot to ping weblogs.com on behalf of the OPML bloggers. How about that. The guy who wrote weblogs.com forgets to ping it. Life sure is funny. Note to those who think the white-on-orange XML icon isn't suitable for international use, consider that the People's Daily, of the People's Republic of China, uses the icon, as-is, without reinventing it. I figure if it's good enough for the Chinese, it should be good enough for Microsoft. I was poking around in my browser trying to find the web server built into the OPML Editor, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when Harry Truman showed up on my Mac desktop, looking just like he did on my Sony Vaio, holding the newspaper, reminding us that the media sometimes garbles the story in transmission. Harry was a great media hacker, and now he's on the Mac. He told the truth and they thought it was hell. So, the big question, does the Mac, the great graphic computer that it is, the home of the classic -- MacPaint, come with a paint program? I just want something that lets me resize graphics and type some text on them, you know the usual Scripting News type graphic illustrations. Nothing too fancy. Don't tell me I'm going to have to buy PhotoShop because that will make me angry. Make me happy and tell me there's something simple and fast already on my hard disk! Where is it? I don't need Garage Band or Dot-Mac, or any of that crap. Give me a paint program or else. Hehe. Sorry. Randy Geise and Adam Hansen send, via email, a great piece of advice. If my Mac comes with AppleWorks, it has a simple Paint program built in. Well my Mac came with AppleWorks. I launched it, created a Paint document and then created a test document. It did what I wanted it to do, until it came time to save the document. First, it didn't have GIF as a format option, but it did have JPEG, which I chose, but it foolishly insisted on giving the file a .PNG extension. That's a deal-stopper. I must have either GIF or JPEG. For pictures JPEG is good, but for these screen diagrams, GIF is better. I suppose there is a way to configure it so it works properly. I'll try again. Lots of people suggest Graphic Converter, but my Mac doesn't seem to have it. I'm going to try to make AppleWorks do what I want. It seems to be really close. Last year on this day: "Watching the Yankees clean the Red Sox's clock." Haha joke's on you Dave. The Red Sox won. Everything. Famous Last Words. You chump. Love, Dave of the future. Two years ago today I wrote publicly that I refuse to be angry with O'Reilly. I renew that pledge again today.
Saturday, October 15, 2005On my daily walk today a little bird landed on my shoulder and whispered something in my ear. "Next week Tim O'Reilly will announce a venture capital fund for Web 2.0 companies," the bird said. Wow. Web 2.0 is big, I thought to myself. Could this be the Flickr of venture funds? I continued on my walk. Jay Rosen is analyzing the NY Times's Judith Miller report. Back in May, when I was still in Florida, I outlined a design for browser-based subscriptions. Microsoft asked me not to publish the design, but now the whole issue is public, and the design is more relevant than ever. John Robb: The Open-Source War. Remember the Yahoo movie trailers feed that had an XML error, but otherwise was interesting and innovative? Well, yesterday I got an email from its product manager saying they would fix it, and this morning, it's fixed. Bing! But... When I click on the link for the movie trailer, I wait a minute and nothing happens. This reminds me of a podcast interview I heard with Ron Bloom, one of the founders of a podcasting network. He says, emphatically, that technology doesn't matter. That's the kind of thing I'm likely to say myself, except when technology does matter. This is one of those times. Suggest to Ron that he ask his partner Adam to explain this, and listen Ron -- because technology can make the difference between a user watching a trailer for a movie, and shutting the window after wasting too much time waiting. AOL has it's own "mini" blogger, an anonymous employee blogging about his or her employer.
Friday, October 14, 2005Mike Arrington got a look at Sphere today. Guidelines for validating OPML. Preparing to write a validator for OPML, I started taking notes about the conventions of OPML, and it turned into an interesting document. If you have a comment, please post it on your blog, and let's see if Memeorandum picks it up. Maybe we can keep the discussion on the high road that way. Or... maybe not. eWeek: "OPML is one of the aspects of Gada.be that make it stand out from existing metasearch engines." TechCrunch: Podtech and SolutionWatch join the Web 2.0 WorkGroup. With an inaugural podcast. | |||||
Every Thursday morning a group of between 20 and 50 Berkeley nerds gets together for breakfast at 
One thing I want to say in my BBQ keynote tonight is that one good thing that's happening is that people are trying out new ideas again. That should be a constant in the tech industry, in good times and in bad. There should always be money for new ideas because you never know which one will turn into the next Visicalc, Wordstar, Mac OS, Excel, Web or whatever. Too many years of drought between the years of wine and roses. 
For once Orlowski gets the 
It's important to note that it's not weblogs that are under attack, just services that concentrate and redistribute weblog content. You won't likely see pointers to spam blogs on Scripting News, even if the search engines are jammed up with them. If you subscribe to 
Since coming back to the Bay Area, most weekends when I'm in town I have breakfast with Steve Gillmor on Saturday morning. A few weeks ago, I asked a couple of other people to join us, and maybe soon I'll ask more. Not sure how to do this, but it's becoming interesting. Sort of an old farts genius network or something like that. OFGN. Whatever. Anyway, I invited a young fart, Mike Arrington, to join us yesterday, and of course an interesting two-hour discussion 
