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Startup School, April 29, Stanford University.
Dennis Forbes: Interesting Facts About Domain Names. Jason Calicanis says he's "ripping off" my style, which is totally okay, and I especially appreciate that he credits me. Perhaps he should use an outliner to write his blog? That could make him even more prolific. One of my many mottos of the past is "Only steal from the best." When you use someone else's idea that's the ultimate sign of respect. But it's important to say who you're stealing from, because they're the best, right?
Steve Gillmor is thankful for many things. BrainJams New Orleans: "On May 4th we are going to bring the best of Web 2.0 to the New Orleans small business community in what could be one of the biggest Unconferences of the year." Somehow I think he knew I'd link to this cartoon. Paul Boutin tries to figure out what Web 2.0 means, and comes to the conclusion it's just the Internet. Apparently BART crashed last night. (Not a train crash, a software crash.) They say all the good domains are taken, but in my experience none of them are.
News.com interview with Guy Kawasaki about Apple at 30. The second of Niall Kennedy's SF Tech Sessions is tonight at the St Francis Hotel, 7-9PM. Steve Gillmor: "This concludes the GestureBank Q&A." 3/29/05: "It's not the shape, it's how you shake it."
Steve Ballmer: "I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod." Lifehacker: "FeedBlendr is a web based RSS feed aggregator that pulls all of your favorite RSS feeds into one aggregate feed." Podfeed does something similar, for podcasts. HotelChatter: Worst Wifi Hotels for 2006. My father has a very popular Flickr picture, it's been viewed over 7000 times. There was lots of pickup on the idea of an unconference on unconferences. I was surprised to find that the podcasting page on Wikipedia now more or less tells an accurate story of the development of the technology. What they mostly omit, however, is the development of the art, and the key roles of Steve Gillmor's, Doug Kaye's and my own early podcasts. But I'm glad to see Chris Lydon get the credt he deserves. He really was the first one to do a series of podcasts, with his 2003 blogger interviews.
Today's a travel day -- expect light posting. 11PM Eastern: Arrived safely in NY. Easy flight. Checking in from Terminal 3 at SFO. Excellent TMobile wifi. TechCrunch report on Evoca, a new podcasting web app that appears to have it all, and can record Skype calls. Jeremy Zawodny asks for ideas for evolving Yahoo Groups. Jared Russell says "no way" to the idea of Second Life as a new operating system. He's right, I have no idea what lies beneath the Second Life user interface, my main point was that the next platform is likely to look entirely different from the Mac/Windows user interface, and to think creatively about what comes next. Scoble says Second Life is an OS. He makes a convincing case. But will Microsoft port Windows to run inside it? That's not actually a joke. Hotel Chatter: Best Wifi Hotels for 2006. Here's a cheat sheet we came up with for BloggerCon III that explains how unconferences work. "We don't have speakers, panels or an audience. We do have discussions and sessions, and each session has a discussion leader." I'd like to do an unconference for people who do conferences. The topic? How to improve conferences, to make them more valuable to the people who participate, to actually enable problem solving, moving the discussion from the hallways into the conference room. A discussion about unconferences may be developing at Matthew Ingram's blog. One year ago, an interesting discussion about Feedburner. Not sure if the issues were resolved. Richard MacManus and Phillip Pearson started blogging around the same time, four years ago, as did Paolo Valdemarin.
The nine-year aniversary of Scripting News is coming up, a week from yesterday. It started on April Fools Day in 1997. Rex Hammock on recovery efforts in Pass Christian, MS. I visited the area in December and took pictures. Mini-Microsoft on last week's bad news and Microsoft's reliance on Scoble to communicate with bloggers, among other topics. It seems from reading Karl Martino and Jeff Jarvis, that yesterday's unconference in Philadelphia was a success. Fighting a cold this week, it kept coming and going until I started taking massive doses of Vitamin C. Knocked the cold down and brought on a nice feeling of health.
Thanks for four years of great blogging, Paolo. I know some people are going to give you shit for that post, but it always felt to me that your blog was written just for me. When talking about an unconference, I find it's helpful to consciously stop myself from using the term "attendee," replacing it with "participant." Love the way this Memeorandum bit came out with the reduced Second Life snippet in the margin. Over on Megite they associated the picture of Bob Hope hitting the road with the OS bit. Last night's movie was Confederate States of America. I didn't really like it that much, most of the jokes were spoiled by an NPR segment I heard a couple of weeks ago. Went with Sylvia, she really liked it, so don't go by what I say. CSA begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw. "If you are going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise they'll kill you."
Jeff Jarvis blogs from an unconference in Philadelphia on the future of news. Rafat Ali snaps a pic of Barry Diller at a cupcake shop. Amy's 17-year-old son is planning a "virility festival." When I'm feeling down I'll just remember that Scripting News is Amanda Congdon's favorite weblog. Wow. Lifehacker advice on hitch-hiking. I've done a fair amount in my younger days. Here's my number one tip. If possible, ask to be let off at a rest area. Then, if you have the chutzpah, walk up to people and ask if they could give you a ride. This gives you a chance to size them up and it's hard to say no to a person, where it's easy to drive by a guy on the side of the road. Also people feel better after a little rest, and are more likely to give you a chance. NY Times: "A 24-year-old blogger for The Washington Post, Ben Domenech, resigned yesterday after being confronted with evidence that he had plagiarized articles in other publications." Niall Kennedy: "I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica."
Steve Gillmor: The Allchin Tax Cut. tvRSS just got a major upgrade. BitTorrent, RSS and TV. This is a really big deal. It's time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT.
Lifehacker: How to get happy. Odeo says podcasting pays. "People want to listen to good stuff! And they'll even pay for it!" The power went out today so I snuck out to the movies and saw Inside Man, which was super-good. I especially liked Jodie Foster as the borderline-evil arranger.
According to David Richards, an unbelievable 60 percent of the Windows Vista code is going to be rewritten before it ships. It's unbelievable because if it's true, there's no way it's shipping in 2007. If true it's not just a setback, it's a multi-billion-dollar debacle on the scale of Apple's Copland (which, if you recall, resulted in regime change). Basically until someone from Microsoft confirms this, I'd give it zero credence. I've said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't accept this. But the longer they delay, the more it will cost them in leadership. Who are the three men and what are they smiling about? Salon: A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist.
Dan Farber: Craig Newmark's modest anti-spam proposal. Bill says to Mike, you better sit down, I got some bad news. Some rational thoughts on A-list blogging. Like this. "Every A-Lister could stop blogging at once and the blogosphere will continue on." You bet it would. Wouldn't it be interesting if every certified A-lister, by convention, didn't blog during the third week of every month. What if that idea caught on? Heh. That might be a mind bomb, right there. MAKE Mag's OPML of their feeds. Viewed in our grazer. Le blog de Jean-Louis Gassee. Fred Wilson's favorite business model: "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base." Jacob Reider sends pointer to docs for a Wiki that has an XML-RPC interface. Britannica responds to Nature on Wikipedia. BBC: Apple attacks plan to open iTunes. Om Malik: Meet Ajax Write. TechCrunch: Jigsaw is a Really, Really Bad Idea. Don't forget to feed the meter
Can you come up with a creative caption for this picture? Wired: How France is saving civilization. Amen. Jon Udell explores Amazon's S3 network storage system. And Matt Croydon is backing up his Flickr pics to S3. People ask why. Because it's interop. It's a blade of grass popping through the ground, certain to be followed by many more. The next blades will be more useful. David Berlind expands on the possible connection between OPML and wikis. Phil Jones found an XML-RPC interface for a wiki, not the MetaWeblog API, though. Steve Rubel notes that the Kremlin supports RSS. Sometimes, rarely, Valleywag has me in stitches.
News.com: Who Microsoft invites to a "conversation" Three years ago today: "Microsoft doesn't really exist to give customers what they want, the harsh truth is that they exist to keep employing more Microsoft people." Thoughts from Sunday's CyberSalon I'm having lunch today with Sylvia to talk about Sunday's CyberSalon. Here are some of my notes. I sat in the front row, an unusual place for me to sit, but it allowed me to pass a note to John Markoff, technology reporter for the NY Times, who was one of the panelists. My note said "It doesn't have to be adversarial." He wrote a response, which wasn't public, so I won't include it here, but a productive discussion followed, and a handshake, and we're having lunch next week in San Francisco. If I had a chance to rewrite the note, I might have said -- It mustn't be adversarial, between us, because we already have a mutual adversary, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, who would, if they could, completely disempower the press, and control the flow of information to the populace. Anyone who's paying attention in 2006 needs to be concerned about this. I think our concern has morphed to ambivalence, because we all feel so powerless to do anything about it. But what if we combined resources, saw ourselves as part of the same effort, with the same goal, to improve the flow of information to the citizens, to counter the negative efforts of the government. I have a sneaky feeling that money would start flowing again, while our attention was focused on our mission, and if we looked at each other, pro and amateur, less like adversaries, and more like allies.
We're not going to get anywhere by calling each other wrong, there's been finger-pointing both ways, and I've done it myself at times, and I've got to remind myself that it's not constructive. The pros have often erred by being dismissive of the bloggers, but maybe we're getting past that. They now tend to see the problem as economic -- that Craig's List is eating into their revenue. But there's a balancing opportunity. Some, perhaps not many, of the people reading Craig's List, share the passion for informaiton and democracy that a good idealistic reporter does, and will do it for love, not money. I believe the vast amount of editorial writing will be done for no money. This isn't really new, after all, the publications don't pay their sources -- and that's ultimately where the information comes from, right?
NY Times: "Microsoft's said that its new Windows operating system would not be ready for consumer personal computers for the holiday sales season." Mini-Microsoft: "Oy. Oy. Oy."
Bruno Pedro has a tool that converts an OPML file into wiki-formattted text. Donald Knuth, famous comp sci prof and book author at Stanford, doesn't have an email address, according to News.com. "You wake up, start answering email and the next thing you know it's noon." I know the feeling. He's also the #1 Don on Google. Phil, thanks for listening, no sarcasm. Scott Rosenberg: "Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy." OPML to Wiki? How long will it be before there's a wiki that supports the MetaWeblog API? A quick search on Google indicates that it might already have happened. Anyway, send me a pointer to such a wiki, and I'll try to get the OPML Editor working with it. If there are problems, I'll document them, and when they're fixed, I'll try again. There's absolutely no reason that you shouldn't be able to edit wiki-text using an outliner, and I bet it would be pretty useful. Phil Jones part 2 Another very interesting narrative about my software strategies by Phil Jones. 1. He's figured some of it out, and he's trying, and that I appreciate. 2. I'm not at war. I'm not trying to defeat the Semantic Web, and I like wikis. You're not going to figure me out with warfare analogies, because 3. I only fight when people try to turn the clock back, because that's the weakness of, the thing I hate most about the tech industry. 4. And he allows me enough pride so I can respond. Many of the people who comment about my work say I'm stupid, or a bad person, and I'm neither, and I won't encourage such discourse by honoring it with a response. As soon as it gets personal, that's when I walk out of the (virtual) room. I wrote a longer piece last night, but that's basically what it says. A Microsoft-run blogging conf?
I'm not at their blogging conference this week, but some honorable folk from the tech blogging community are. I wonder if they're having a session on Fact-checking Your Ass. Did you ever see the Sprint commercial with the guy sitting behind the desk in front of a top-floor skyscraper window, explaining how he's using his cell phone to Stick It To The Man. His assistant, a Smithers type, says, But you are The Man. He responds, "I know." So you're sticking it to yourself? Big pause. Maybe. In other words, there's something weird and funny about a Microsoft-run blogging conference. There's something not very blogging about it. Hmmm.
New features in the OPML Editor this morning. New commands in the right-click menu to add a feed (grazing), or, if experimental OPML 2.0 support is enabled, add an inclusion.
Scott Rosenberg on last night's CyberSalon. Save the Merc? Dan Gillmor suggests that Yahoo might be the white knight to save the San Jose Mercury News. I would support community involvement in saving the Mercury News, if the Mercury News would become a pioneer in community journalism. There are hundreds of thousands of potential journalists in the South Bay who could cover every school board, zoning commission, shareholder meeting. They could report on housing prices and gas prices, traffic patterns and other quality of life issues. How about helping us understand why mass transit doesn't better serve the area. Integrate the South Bay universities, which include some of the best in the world, with the communities. A newly configured Mercury News would include daily reports from sister publications in Bangalore and Shanghai. This is how news will work in the 21st Century. The South Bay would become one of the best-served metro areas in the US, after being one of the worst. I don't know very many people who feel fondness for the Mercury News. I lived in the their geography for 24 years, I never subscribed. I read the paper occasionally when I went out for breakfast, but I was raised on New York's newspapers, and in comparison the Merc is strictly second tier, if that. To get people excited enough to rally behind it, they're going to have to do something exciting. How to How to make money on the Internet v2.0: "If journalists won't write from a users' perspective, what's to stop the users from becoming journalists?"
Photos from the Berkeley CyberSalon. AutoLink in a nutshell One year ago today: "Danny O'Brien, writing on an O'Reilly site rants at and about me, and my position on Google's AutoLink. He quotes me saying things I'm quite sure I never said, and don't agree with, and then proceeds to make fun of me for saying these things that I didn't say, and he discredits the ideas behind the quotes, and not surprisingly he wins the argument -- that he's having with himself!" "The irony is that the debate is about Google changing what people say." Who is Phil Jones?
In the comments on Hugh MacLeod's blog post about me turning down god because I was too busy with RSS, he says: "Dave didn't invent RSS. Nor does he claim to. Go listen to the NerdTV interview he did with Robert Cringely where he explicitly says he realized that (to paraphrase) the second mover 'makes' the standard, and so he threw away his own syndication format to support Netscape's RSS." That's true -- and an important consideration that most people don't seem to understand. In the world of standards the second-mover is the decision-maker, the first-mover is at the second guy's mercy. In the case of simple syndication formats, Netscape was the second mover, they blew off my earlier work. So I decided that I could either sulk about it, or do the powerful thing. Of course I did the powerful thing. I added all the features of their format to mine, which they responded to (as I thought they would) by adding all the features of my format to theirs. At that point, I had what I wanted, I put a bullet in the head of my format, and made RSS my cause. Invention here is hardly the issue. What matters is adoption and forward motion. The smart people in this space do what smart people do everywhere, they listen, think, learn and adapt, like Jones is doing. The idiots rule the roost though, it's very hard to hear the intellect through all the honking and barking and ruckus that the idiots make. (Not talking about Hugh, his contribution is satire, and that's always welcome. If you can't laugh at yourself you break.) Shane I watched Shane last night, rented from Netflix. It's really dated, kind of hard to watch because the acting is so bad, and the mid-20th century actors look so out of place in 19th-century Wyoming. But it was worth watching to understand what Nick Carr was saying about the place the blogosphere might be at.
Shane, played by Alan Ladd, is a gunslinger for the farmers. The movie builds to a showdown with the hired gunslinger for the ranchers, played by a young Jack Palance. Ladd wins (of course, I'm giving nothing away) and the farmers take over, for now. But when you drive around in this part of the country today you don't see many farms, the land is too poor for farming and the summers too short. I think the ranchers eventually did win the argument, which kind of undermines the plot of Shane and the story that Nick Carr told. After writing this, I re-read Carr's piece, and it's funnier than ever. Carr is a great writer and thinker. I hope to meet him some day and shake his hand. State of the blogosphere The question of whether my retirement has any significance for the blogosphere is likely to come up tonight at the well-timed CyberSalon, with a variety of different panelists with a variety of views of the staying power and utility of the blogosphere. Me, I'm tired, and I don't enjoy being the the go-to guy for snarky folk who try to improve their page-rank by leading idiotic tirades about their supposed insights into my character. I want to enjoy the ability to plan and think before my would-be competitors have a chance to position themselves to grab the fruits of my labor. Too much transparency can be a hindrance, so I'm looking for less of that, and more fun, and more options. Me, I'm thinking fiction might be fun. I'm thinking about dialog, and how a novel is a continuum, and a bunch of short stories hanging off a tree, and a few diversions to keep the reader on his or her toes. I'm thinking about the craft of writing in ways I've never done before. I also see that much of what happens in the tech and publishing world happens "off-blog." This week I had a bunch of meetings, in San Diego, Berkeley and San Francisco, none of which were blogged, by myself or the people I was meeting with. Did they care about the looney tunes world that the tech blogosphere has become? Not one bit. At the two conferences I've participated in recently, Under the Radar and PC Forum, after a long absence from tech conferences (Gnomedex last summer was the previous one, and that was an exceptional event for me) that absence does make the heart grow fonder. So by taking a hike and working on my health and learning some new crafts, and working offstage more and more, I hope to evoke more fondness, smiles and hugs, and less lies, sneers and dishonesty. If we've learned anything about humanity, is that it's really good at closing ranks, filling gaps, and moving on. If a famous reporter were to retire, some young dude would come along and take his place, maybe three or four. In the competitive landscape that comes after a big tree falls, comes fresh thinking, as I hope to bring fresh perspectives to my next pursuits. And freshness is good. For me, writing here is becoming stale, I'm energized by the idea of new frontiers, new holes to dig and then fill in and dig again.
Reminder: CyberSalon, tomorrow, in Berkeley. Chris Pirillo: "Just as a Web browser interprets HTML, there will be a new range of products -- both Web-based and on your desktop -- that will support and parse this strange new OPML thingy for you." 0xDECAFBAD: "Why don't we have a Xanadu web run on Lisp serving up perfect, crystalline RDF?" Dowbrigade reports on a new Internet scam that involves cashing counterfeit checks.
Movie: Train pulling into BART station. Last year on this day: Surfers in a roiling Atlantic. Three years ago: "I've arrived in Cambridge. Rarin to go!" The Web Innovators Group of Boston will meet on Monday at the Hotel at MIT. Eirepreneur defines a "feed grazer" as an "OPML browser and an RSS reader in one." Just FYI, the directory browser that's built into the OPML Community Server has this feature. The next header graphic. I can't wait to use this pic cribbed from a picture of the beach in Florida, but I have to let the railroad crossing run for a few more days. Tom Morris: "I'm surprised that nobody has done anything Web 2.0-ish with the humble discussion forum." TechCrunch will have an awards party, mid-year, too big for Mike's house. Amen to that. How about Candlestick? Okay, seriously, there's a new Four Seasons in Palo Alto. Spicy Noodles for 10,000. Ben Barren may win the award for best list of possible (funny) TechCrunch awards. I am an animated inventor.
Phil Jones: "The entire history of computer science can be interpretted as one long war between pragmatic tool builders and idealistic format / process builders." Mike Arrington notes that the NY Times is linking to the discussion on Scripting News from Esther's op-ed piece. That's pretty coooool!
ComputerWorld: New Orleans' Wi-Fi network now a lifeline. Mary Hodder: 400 skydivers in tandem. I've been emailing with David Berlind who is in the hospital recovering from back surgery yesterday, apparently it was successful and he's getting better. Best wishes to David and his family. I missed this bit about a speech given by retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, warning of "dictatorship" in the United States. It was mentioned at the end of the first hour of the Diane Rehm show this morning. Dan MacTough: "The buzz-o-meter on OPML browsers is off the charts right now." New header graphic. A railroad crossing in northwest Wisconsin, photographed on 8/29/04. Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out. Looking for Mr Goodmail
Daniel Dreymann, co-founder of Goodmail, checks in. "Most leading vendors have already signed up with Goodmail to make it a standard feature on their MTAs." I asked if they have filed for or received patents. Dreymann said: "We do have intellectual property here but we provide software libraries for implementing the sending side and libraries for the receiving side -- all free of charge to interested MTA implementers." Sounds like they do have patents. Okay, that's a reason it might not work. MTA is an acronym for Mail Transfer Agent.
Congrats to John Furrier who raised $5.5 million to fund his Podtech podcasting venture. This was a surprise, but a nice one. John is a member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, as am I, he's got lots of friends in the community.
Sylvia: "Geniuses are not only supposed to be innovative thinkers -- the ones who come up with new memes, technologies, and art -- they're also supposed to be kind and loving to competitors, thieves, ex wives, and assholes." It took a couple of days for the brilliance of the continuity in the Sopranos to catch up with me. It's been two years since the last episode, and instead of picking up where they left off, the characters have gone on while the show wasn't being aired. So now Uncle Junior is completely demented, Tony has a newborn niece, and his marriage with Carmella is repaired. We have no clue how any of this happened, but there it is. While on the subject of the Sopranos, I noticed something about the picture on the website. Who's the guy in the middle? I thought I knew all the characters. And who's not in the picture! Without wanting to spoil it for those who haven't seen this season's opener, remember what it leaves unresolved. Are they using the website to give us a clue as to the resolution? It's like Kremlinology. And where was the picture taken? Does that look like a funeral home to you? It's been a while since I commented on ads in RSS feeds, but don't you think the signal-to-noise ratio is a little low in this Economist feed? Another low signal-to-noise ratio feed. This is why I think of Nick Bradbury as a stand-up guy. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to say something.
PaidContent reports that Netscape.Com is coming back as a Digg-like site, with Jason Calacanis at the head. OPML innovation I noted that the first item in the Grazr demo is the outline of past DaveNet essays. I wondered if people were aware that the archive of Scripting News is also available in OPML There are several ways to access it. First, you can browse it in HTML, or as OPML, or in any OPML-compatible app, like Grazr for example. Here's today's Scripting News, viewed in the OPML browser. Interesting, no? I hope other people will be able to use this in their demos. An aha waiting? Now you might see this blog in a new way. Scripting News is just an OPML browser. One of many ways to browse hierarchies. No parking meter They don't have parking meters in the mountains outside Salt Lake City, Utah; but they do have signs that advise you not to litter. Click on the pic to get the joke.
Unfortunately, there's another controversy with Rogers Cadenhead. He asked to handle this matter privately and using attorneys, both of which I agreed to. Then he apparently changed his mind, and published my attorney's letter to him. Grazr is a Javascript-based OPML browser that can be included dynamically in web pages. Marc Canter says "aggregate." People have pointed out that there's more than one level of irony in yesterday's post about Identity Woman. Retirement roundup Since I've been at a conference the last two days, I haven't had enough time to follow all the discussion about my decision to stop blogging. This morning I got up very early, ready to fly back to the Bay Area, and had some time to wade through the commentary and had some comments, since I am still blogging. Several essays stood out as thoughtful, interesting, original, and had elements of truth to them, imho, that were unique. Nick Carr: Once upon a time in the west. I've never seen Shane, but I will. I like the imagery. Even now some friends send me emails saying I should fight. I thought I said pretty clearly that I'm not fighting. You want a fight, you do it. I gave at the office. Some people have characterized my post as a suicide note, and that's correct, it is a suicide note. Let me explain. There's a virtual Dave and a real one. Here, you're reading the virtual one. Some people hate this guy, some people love him. Lots of people invent new features of this guy, that are so different from the real guy that if the real guy met the other people's version of the virtual guy, he would line up to punch him in the nose too. Over time, this duality has gotten further off track to the point where people come up to the real guy in restaurants and shake the virtual guy's hand. People threaten to hurt the virtual guy, and mistakenly hit the real guy. The real guy has serious health issues and has to take care of himself, and everyone who reads this blog knows this, yet they still create huge battles with the guy, and otherwise considerate people stand by and watch and do nothing. Eventually the real guy decided enough of this bullshit. I just want to be the real guy. When I started blogging it was all about creating a platform for people to be real. Well if I have to live up to your fantasies to be able to blog, I quit. Maybe there's still some life left in the real guy. This is not meant to make you feel sad, or guilty or miss me or anything else. This isn't about you. It never was about you. When you read other people's blogs, think about that. They're not writing about you, they're writing about them. The real Dave won't stop writing, btw. The virtual Dave is going to stop. Bye-bye. See y'all later. So Nick, I'll watch Shane, for sure, but another movie whose plot may be like this story is Heaven Can Wait. If you like reading the real Dave, be prepared to play the role Julie Christie played. If a stranger walks up to you and asks to buy you a cup of coffee, you might want to say yes.
Scoble: "I'm getting fat but I'm fat and happy." Identity Woman, whose alter-ego is sitting next to me at PC Forum, is hosting an identity conference in Mountain View, May 1-3. I just signed up for Amazon S3. Here are the docs. There doesn't appear to be a web app that allows you to upload a file to try it out? I really wish they had an XML-RPC interface, if they did, I could start programming it right away, since they don't have sample code for my environment. It seems that XML-RPC would get them support for all the environments, not just the ones they say are most popular. No matter what, I'm going to try programming against the SOAP interface.
9/12/99: "The purpose of XML-RPC is to end once and for all, the idea that there can or should be one operating system for all. No more über-operating systems, and no press releases claiming über-ness!" Colin Faulkingham: "Amazon S3 supports BitTorrent, it will create and seed your object (file)." Bing! That's one of this year's game-changers. Google bought Sketchup, 3-D software. Nicco Mele: "The bill is designed to (a) protect bloggers and online political activity and (b) open large loop-holes in campaign finance law." BBC: "Bullies are increasingly using the internet to terrorise teenagers outside of school, a survey suggests." Gabe Rivera's new memetracker, "Automatic Dirt Digger." No one guessed who the guy with the jacket on his head is. For 10 bonus points, why was the jacket on his head? Use the comments on the Flickr pic to post your ideas. TechCrunch: "Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now)."
Hugh MacLeod: "I remember when God asked me..." Scott Karp: "If Dave abandoned Scripting News and started a new blog with a new name, would it be fundamentally different from Scripting News, even if it was still Dave? I think the answer is yes." Kevin Burton announces a River of News view of the TailRank story flow. The 2006 weblog awards were presented in Austin today. Identity gurus hang out on the patio, catching some sun, talking politics. Guess who the guy with the coat draped over his head is. Kim Cameron from Microsoft said there isn't much chance that they'll disinvite Tim O'Reilly to Mix 06, but he might be able to talk Bill Gates into apologizing for inviting him, before Tim comes out on stage. I said I'd pay to see that! One of this afternoon's presenters is bitty.com. Sounds very interesting. News.com: "VeriSign announced Monday that it plans to acquire Kontiki for $62 million, in a move to enter the broadband content services market." This is an interesting and unexpected acquisition. Mike Graves from VeriSign is here in Carlsbad, I'll ask him what's up with this deal. Yahoo: "It's a spiffy-looking module you display on your website to show off your series rating on Yahoo! Podcasts and encourage your listeners to rate and review your show on Yahoo!" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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