Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Essay: "I first learned that Google is a business run by business people when, a few weeks after buying Blogger in 2003, they added a Blog This button to their toolbar." 

New Flickr set: A bunch of us went for lunch today at the restaurant where the next Berkeley Blogger's dinner will be held on February 9 at 7PM. It seems like a perfectly huge place for our dinner, the food is good enough, and the service friendly, and fairly third world as is the hotel. I swear downtown Berkeley is in Jamaica or Africa or maybe South America somewhere. The wait staff seemed to be from Honduras or El Salvador. The food of course is Afghani. We had a lot of laughs at lunch today and ate too much, but it was totally fun. I think we found a great place for blogging. Oh yeah, they have free wifi. What else do you need!  

Movies from today's lunch. 1. Marc Canter makes his entrance. 2. Then I asked Don Hopkins, repeatedly, if he had something to say to Scripting News readers. Click on them in sequence, Don is reallllly funny. 3. And then Marc got a call from Mary Hodder. 

I got an IM from a Frontier user from years ago: "I'd like to contribute to the OPML Editor community. Can we talk about the appropriate way to do this? I have a large amount of UserTalk knowledge that I want to continue to use." My response: "Just join the community and start participating. There are no formal roles. Become an expert in something and help people out. That's how it works. 

Per today's podcast, here's a revised howto for the OPML Community Server plain vanilla install.  

I am definitely part of the publishing industry as I wrote in January. Every day I become more sure of it, and every day my distaste for the tech industry grows. What a bunch of greedy selfish control freaks. I never thought I'd see the day when I could point to Microsoft as an oasis of service, and help and understanding for users. Yahoo is great too. The rest of em, esp the small ones struggling to find a business model or get acquired, they're so desperate, so small-minded, so greedy, so uncreative, I can't find enough adjectives to tell you how far away from them I want to be. I am a publisher, I love RSS, and I'm proud of it. 

Today's podcast is about WordPress, Google and the OPML community. It's especially important for the leaders of the OPML community to listen to this podcast, because I want to explore ways for the support system to grow. I think we just had a very good experience and I want to build on it. 

As part of today's podcast, I set up a new section of the OPML Docs directory for the server. What an oversight that the docs weren't linked into the directory. Whew. 

Listen to the Blog of the Union show, aired yesterday on various NPR stations.  

News.com: Newspapers want search engines to pay. 

In yesterday's State of the Union piece, I suggested that The West Wing must not be very expensive to make, but Hal O'Brien wrote to say that in fact it is one of the most expensive shows. Every Senator's office cost $80K. Yow. Okay, I don't care about the sets. Put it on a stage in a high school auditorium. Make it a Sims scenario. It's the story, the characters, their brightness and integrity that I value. Sure it's nice that the sets look cool, but that's not what makes the show so great. 

A follow-on thought to the Friendship piece, there's another type of false "friend" -- one who sees the relationship as some sort of business model. He or she builds up equity (I suppose in the form of trust) and then when they feel its got the highest value, cash it in. As you get more famous this happens more often, sadly, it becomes harder to tell who would be your friend even if you weren't influential and/or rich. This is one of the reasons I sold the big house and started driving an ordinary car. You only think the trappings matter before you have the means to aquire them. Then, oddly enough, I found I wished to be ordinary, because in fact I still was.  

Maybe this is what was behind Greta Garbo's sunglasses and her famous "I vant to be alone" line, which is from Grand Hotel, a wonderful movie, one of the early "talkies." 

BTW, I basically like any movie with Joan Crawford in it. I recently got The Women from Netflix. Awesome. Crawford plays the cold bitch to Norma Shearer's big-hearted fool (who gets wise in the end). An incredible all-female cast (not one man appears in the whole movie, not even an off-screen voice).