Thursday, June 01, 2006

Tom Foremski: "It was two years ago today that I left the comfort of the Financial Times San Francisco bureau, the six-figure salary/benefits package, the six-weeks of vacation, and the generous sabbaticals every four years, to become a journalist blogger." 

Lifehacker is looking for weather feeds. I use RSS Weather, for example, here's the feed for Cambridge, MA. Unfortunately they (confusingly) obscure the RSS, they didn't used to. Arrrgh. 

Yahoo has weather feeds, without the annoying (and confusing) obscuring. 

Technorati: "Leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out." 

The Atlantic hurricane season begins. The National Hurricane Center publishes its outlook. They have an RSS 2.0 feed.  

The revolution will not be monetized 

For the last week or so the tech blogosphere has been obsessing about a trademark, and missing an opportunity to refocus. The purpose of the two-way-web is not to make money for conference promoters, esp conferences that are structured around the old model -- "they speak, we listen."

The VCs only listen to other VCs, and would turn us into users who generate content that they wish to monetize. Not too exciting for you and me.

Tim Bray started a new thread which he calls Credit 2.0, which is worth continuing.

I'd like to add an excerpt from an essay I wrote roughly seven years ago, called Edit This Page. "Writing for the web is too damned hard. It turns you into a bookkeeper. I've got files all over my hard disk and their counterparts on the server. I can't keep track of them! When I'm reading a web page that I wrote, if I spot a mistake, I have to execute 23 complicated error-prone steps to make the change."

As a software developer, that was the challenge, that we rose to, and solved, and the result is a vibrant medium for expressing ideas and information. Let them argue about who owns the trademarks and how the advertisers from the last century can hold on for a few more years. The future we're living in isn't just like the past.