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Raise your hand if you believe President Bush. I didn't think so. ZDNet Australia: "When companies launch a brand new product it usually takes some time to weed out the niggling issues; but how many systems need to break before the situation is recognised as a disaster rather than an unfortunate blip in quality control?" Apparently no one asked Tim Berners-Lee how he feels about "Web 2.0." Listen to this podcast. He says the web has always been two-way. Not exactly big news here. Josh Bancroft is live-blogging the birth of his second child using YoMoBlog. (!) Scoble: "I'm boring." New header graphic, the Oakland Coliseum, night game. The picture of the ballpark, above, is geotagged. Geotagging makes pages like this almost obsolete. (I couldn't arrange for it to show me all pictures taken at 451 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA, the location of the Apple Store.) Jeff Veen has been geotagging too. Glenn Ford, the thoughtful Hollywood leading man, died Wednesday at age 90.
Mike Yamamoto: Can Web 2.0 save newspapers? Today's song: "Then I'll get on my knees and pray we don't get fooled again." Apparently Yomoblog works with Drupal. That's cool! (An illustration of the power of community developed standards. There was no standards body that Drupal was a member of that decided this is the way we should work together. One vendor stepped up and said "This is how we're going to do it," and the next one said, "Okay we'll do it that way too.") Isn't it I honestly don't understand how people can send their computers to be repaired for a month, have them come back, not work, and then send them back again. I hear that all the time about people and their Macs. If I'm down for two days I have to buy a new computer. Back to Macs and how they Timidly, Scoble asks if he wasn't invited back to O'Reilly-ville because someone complained about him taking videos.
Today's song: "I'm goin' home, and when I wanna go home I'm goin' mobile." Last year on this day: "The New Orleans Times-Picayune has switched to weblog format for breaking news." Business 2.0: The New York Times' digital makeover. Todd Ziegler: 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites. Chris Kelley: "I hope Steve Gillmor is right that links are dead because I can't see anyway to get A URL in here." In the Trenches: "Pretty darn sick!" Brian Jepson: "Dave says it's short for Your Mobile Weblog, but I think it's short for Yo! Moblog!" Posting from a Blackberry Today I'd like to share a tool I wrote that allows me to write and edit blog posts using a mobile device. I knew I'd have to have this tool as soon as I found myself carrying a Blackberry at times when I'd usually have my black MacBook with me. If you visit that page, which is designed to work on a mobile device (it'll look crunched up on a desktop or laptop) you'll be asked to enter several bits of information (it may make sense to gather them in advance). 1. The address of your weblog. It must support the Metaweblog API and Really Simple Discoverability (RSD). Most WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type and Manila sites do, we've tested the service with these tools with good results. If you're not sure whether your blog is compatible, give it a try. Important note: If there are problems please report them on the Blackberry-Bloggers mail list, which has been set up for that purpose. 2. Your email address. You know the drill. We'll send a confirming email to this account, with a magic URL that validates your account. So you must be able to receive email at this address. 3. The username and password for your weblog. These are the two bits you use to log onto WordPress, TypePad or Manila. You must provide these so yomoblog.com can post on your behalf. Click Submit, check your mail, click the link, click again, and enter your email address and password. (This is the tricky part. The username here is your email address, not the username for your blogging software.) From then on you'll visit: Which is also designed for a mobile screen and will look scrunched on a desktop or laptop. A few notes. When you delete a post, you are only deleting the copy on our server, the post on your blog is not deleted. This is a safety precaution. It does support categories, which appear as checkboxes on the form, which is long. Scroll down to see the checkboxes and other less-often used user interface elements. There's also a list of previous posts, which you can edit whenever you like by clicking on the name of the post, and then editing the text in the form. Yomoblog.com works on any web-enabled mobile device, not just a Blackberry. This is experimental software. Please back up your data. We are not responsible for any loss in service, or loss of data entered into the system. Will not use your personal information for any purpose other than to allow you to create and edit posts on your weblog. The security of the system is lightweight, don't trust it for sensitive information. We make no guarantees about performance, uptime, and we may cancel the service at any time, for any reason, at our discretion. A page listing recent blog posts: YoMoBlog stands for Your Mobile Weblog. If you use it, I hope you enjoy it! An open note to O'Reillyites I know it may be hard to believe this, but I don't wish your company harm, or anyone at your company including the top guy. However, it wasn't until the last round of BS that I realized why there's such a big disconnect, and I thought I should share it, in case any of you are tired of the disconnect too. Even if you don't care about mending fences with me, there's a bigger problem, and it's going to spill over, I think pretty soon. You can feel it out there. Hire a consultant if you don't believe me. It's worth checking out. A dam is about to break. There are a lot of people pissed at O'Reilly, every time you do another exclusive event, more people are getting angry. But so far they're not saying anything publicly because your company has said, clearly, that if you say anything negative about them, you won't be invited. Enough people still have some hope that they don't want to be the one to say how they feel about it. But there's lots of back channel grumbling. Me, I am an ornery dude. If someone tells me that I have to shut up or I won't get invited, my response is to tell you to fuck off, in public, loudly. I value my independence more than anything. I don't want an invite to FOO Camp next year, or the year after. If you want me to sign something that says I will never under any circumstances come to FOO Camp, I'll sign it. So I'm not kissing up here, I don't want an invite. But what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess. We have work to do here. We have a bubble-pop to avoid. We need to start doing some real investing in technology, not the BS that passes for technology investing that's been going on for the last decade. So if you could take Tim aside, and say look, this isn't working, we have to grow bigger, and let people say what they think about us, and our role in the industry. We're not going to be able to keep a lid on it much longer, and it's better to let it out in a way where people know we're listening and we want to work with them. I had an experience like this with Apple in 1997. The company was in disarray, the market was sinking fast. Craig Cline, who was running the Seybold Conference at the time asked me to chair a panel entitled "Can Apple Survive?" I accepted the assignment with gusto. This is exactly what we needed to get out in the open. But Apple controlled the conversation and they tried to sabotage us. Well we had the discussion anyway, ask anyone who was there, it was a real good thing we had it. A lot of people were very concerned, and rightly so. By getting the angst out of the way, we were able to focus on what was working in the Mac market, and that played some role in the revival of Apple. Not a very famous role, but I think an important one. We need to get all hands involved in what we used to call Web 2.0. It's time for it to stop being exclusive, and it's way past time for one company to be controlling who's supposed to participate. I've totally earned the respect of this community, and dammit it's time O'Reilly to show some of that. You've behaved really inappropriately for a company of your stature. Let's get past this, and let's start building, and forget whatever it is that's been in our way. I posted a very generous invite to Tim two days ago, I've been reaching out this way for years, now it's about time you guys responded, don't you think? Yeah I know it's a long shot, but I want to be able to say I did everything I could to fix the problem. It's worth trying to fix, and pride (which believe it or not I have a lot of) isn't something that should get in the way. Peace, Dave Apple in the news
Just when I think Mike has turned into a lapdog for the tech industry he inspires me with something like this! And with Eric Schmidt on Apple's board, not much chance of Google launching an iTunes killer.
Last night I went to the Oakland Coliseum to see the A's beat the Red Sox, 9-0. Om Malik: "Today's news of Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the board of directors of Apple Computer portends potential headaches not just for Microsoft, but for anyone with digital media ambitions." BBCriver.com got a nice mention on Rocketboom today. Thanks. These guys are champs.
Mark Fletcher writes that Bloglines reports the number of subscribers each time it requests the feed. Lorenzo Viscanti: "Feedburner's count is just an approximation." Feedburner: "Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed." Revisiting another question I asked clumsily, about restrictions on speech that you accept when you participate in an invitation-only event, I posted a comment on David Weinberger's blog this evening that attempts to explain the issue in 1-2-3 fashion. To be clear, although the questions are about Foo Camp, it's really more general. EJ Dionne: "By Election Day, how many Republican candidates will have come out against the Iraq war or distanced themselves from the administration's policies?" Duncan Riley names "kvetch" the word of the day. kevetch.com is Derek Powazek's weblog, since 1995. Four years ago today: "I would love it if the source for MORE were released. I think it would be a humantarian contribution of the first order, but it's not mine to make." Hurts so good Without comment, here's a recent post from Tim O'Reilly. David [Weinberger] -- I'm curious about the ambivalence you express here. It sounds to me like you're trying to curry favor with the well-known critics of FOO (and obviously, you failed) rather than giving us real insight. Yes, FOO Camp is exclusive in the sense that it's invite-only, but if you're honest, you'll have to admit that it's one of the most diverse technical conferences you're ever likely to attend. We make a real effort to invite people from different technical communities, people who ought to know each other, but don't. One of our goals is to create new synapses in the global brain, so to speak. This is way more diverse than an open-to-all comers event that draws from the same community. And it's precisely because we limit attendance that we're able to manage that creative mix. Do you bake a cake by using whatever amount of flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate you happen to have in your kitchen? There's a range of experiment, but in the end, you control the mix because you know that some combinations are essential for the cake to work at all. This is not to say that an open-to-all comers event can't also work (assuming you have either a narrow topic that doesn't draw a huge crowd, or else a venue that can hold all comers, and a set of goals that will work for a very large event.) But it would be a very different kind of event, and for our purposes, much less successful. Stop worrying about what Winer thinks. He's perfectly happy to attend exclusive events, as long as he's invited. He has a grudge against me, for reasons only he understands, and despite his many other virtues, on this subject, he just needs to be ignored. There are lots of ways to do great events. FOO is one. Bar Camp is another (and we're honored to be imitated, and in fact have invited some of the Bar Camp people this year to be sure that they learn as much as they can about how we do it.) If only... One year ago today: "Good morning. It seems New Orleans has been spared the disaster. That's cool, it's a very nice city, and so far has been totally lucky. Knock wood, praise Murphy, seems the luck has held."
New OPML Editor feature: Portable rivers. Liz Gannes: "Flickr photos can now be geo-tagged via a drag-and-drop interface with Yahoo Maps."
I've had the same problem with my MacBook spontaneously and instantly shutting down. My machine has always rebooted. I thought it was because I was watching a movie, that seemed to be when it would happen. The movie was Themla and Louise, btw. On David Weinberger's blog: "Come on Tim, let's get beyond whatever it is that's in our way." Mike Arrington boasts 100K readers of his RSS feed. I've always wondered how he knows how many people are subscribed to a feed. You don't have to register to read a feed. So what does the number mean? Steve Gillmor: Beam me up, Sergey.
3/28/03: "We can't win the war in Iraq." Scoble kvetches that the tech blogosphere is paying too much attention to Google's aspirations in the Office market. Not here. I don't care about Office software if it comes from Microsoft, Google or God. I know a lot of people use it, but you can't touch the stuff if you care about lock-in. Office Wars are all about who locks you in the nicest trunk. I prefer to ride up front, even if the ride is rough and the door doesn't stay closed without a bit of rope. BlogTalk, Vienna, Oct 2-3. Wired: "Lockheed Martin's advanced Skunk Works unit is designing a small, 12-seat passenger jet that would travel at 1,200 mph (Mach 1.8) but which would produce only a whisper of the annoying crack once emitted by the retired Concorde." Why post from a Blackberry? I've seen a few blog posts asking why would you want to post from a Blackberry? After all, you could carry a laptop with you, and of course typing on a laptop keyboard is much easier than typing on a PDA keyboard (it is, no argument there). And maybe it's a good idea to take a break from blog posting sometimes, maybe it's a good thing that you can't post from every conceivable place. Rather than quickly respond in a comment, I want to respond here, where I can create a list and add to it over time. 1. I think it's important to flip the question around, because when you do it helps reveal the why of it. Is email the only form of communication that makes sense when using a Blackberry? Well, maybe for some people, but for others, who may have to communicate with a workgroup, or their family, or create an RSS feed for their observations away from work or home, using weblog software makes a lot of sense, not to exclusion of email, but in addition to it. 2. Okay, great, but you can use email to post to a weblog, why not just do that? Well, I tried it. In 2001, I programmed Radio 8, which shipped in early 2002, to receive blog posts via email. The problem with that is that unlike email, I like to edit my blog posts, make spelling corrections, add items to a list, reorganize, prioritize, etc. When you're using email to post to a blog, it's a lot like email (surprise!) -- your first version is your last. Again, email is useful, I send emails all the time, but blogging is useful too. 3. To the point that a laptop can go with you everywhere a Blackberry can, that's obviously not true. I have my Blackberry with me when I'm in line at the supermarket, I almost never have a laptop with me then. But that doesn't mean I don't get ideas while standing in line. A few other places Blackberries go that laptops don't: ski lifts, restaurants, cabs, buses and yes, bathrooms. (Someone had to say that, glad it's out of the way.) Jackie Danicki writes that she blogged "from the Vatican during New Year's Eve Mass, with the Pope a few feet in front of me." You could also blog during a disaster like a hurricane or after an earthquake. 4. Bonus point. People have even said they tried reading news on a Blackberry and it was too cumbersome. That's why we have to bang the drum so loudly and even then a few days later people didn't get the message: With a simple change in the way news is presented, it works. It's not a technical breakthrough, it's a usability improvement, but it makes a big difference. Try it out before you dismiss it, and don't try it on a desktop or laptop, try it on a PDA. Here's the New York Times in this format, and the BBC. Republican Cut and Run, Day 1 Washington Post: "Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), once an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq, said yesterday that the Bush administration should set a time frame for withdrawing U.S. troops." And now that we have our first quote, here's the site.
I couldn't help myself, I had to buy CutAndRunNow.com. I'm going to put a Republican campaign site there, listing all the Republican quotes that come along that even hint of cutting and running. I expect an overflowing site. Ray Edwards: "One thing that I have noticed about the OPML editor/Newsriver combo is that it changes the way I blog." Dennis from WAP Review: "The Rivers are 50-75K for the main page. Ordinary mobile phones like the RAZR for example, and just about anything without a keyboard or touchscreen have a page size limit of between 10 and 30K." Bernie Goldbach, via email: "All 3G phones sold in Europe deliver over-the-air playback of MP3 files that make the experience feel as though it's streaming service. I pay around $60 a month for podcasts that get me to and from work. I'm limited to 2 gigs of transfer traffic a month before I start paying around $1 a megabyte for the privilege of getting podcasts 'live.'" Bob Stepno: "Back when Jimmy Carter was president, anyone with a big computer downstairs and thousands of dollars in wire service subscriptions could read a daily 'river of news' on our computer screens." It doesn't take much to amuse me. I think it's cool that there's a picture of Jimmy Carter on Techmeme. Internet time Thanks Marc for the kind words. Actually, there is lots that's new in what I'm doing now, except it was new in 1999, when I was doing it for the first time. And as you can see from Bob Stepno's piece, the concept is as old as journalism. He's saying the same thing that Paul Kedrosky said, without being condescending. (We should give awards to people who find a way of giving feedback without attacking someone on a personal level. Stepno, who is a gentle person, would rate high.)
I love that one of the jackasses who says I'm an idiot also happens to be squatting on the "generic" domain in this area. Yeah I'm working for the asshole, but he isn't smart enough to avoid kicking me in the ass as I make him a bunch of money. Isn't that the height of stupidity? (Don't worry, I bought newsrivr.com, just for fun.) People said, in 2004, that podcasting was an instant success that could only happen in Internet Time. Uh huh. Except that we started pushing it in January 2001, and didn't arrive at the right pitch until the summer of 2004. Of course the world had to change too, it helped that there were lots of iPods and people were receptive to thinking about new ways to use MP3.
You have to stick with ideas if you want to actually deliver. No doubt there are people with khaki pants and blue shirts, MBAs, and mid-range BMWs, raising money right now with VCs to do what you see me doing here. They don't like old Jewish guys who use their hands when they talk. I think they're scared we might hug them. Anyway, some of the khaki dudes will get rich, and some of them will meet me at a TechCrunch party one day and thank me for the work I'm doing now. Your crazy uncle, Dave PS: Sneak preview of tomorrow's big feature.
Something to ponder. How close the various PDA-makers are to something that would kick the iPod in the behind. We just need a quick way to get an MP3 over HTTP. These cell phones, with built-in speakers even, are good at audio. NewsRiver feature: Eliminate duplicate stories? NewsRiver feature: Goodbye annoying "web bugs!" Andrew Baron: "Google Video is set up so that you can actually link to any second in the video." I learned something today on my walk that I did not know. Writely, the Google-acquired web-based word processor, can generate RSS. This I have to check out. If it works well, that means that Writely is actually a blogging tool. Could it possibly be that cool? I'll report back. BTW, it came from the NY Times Tech Talk podcast. Postscript: Hold on to your hats, Writely supports the Metaweblog API. That's awesome! Library Camp East, Darien CT, Sept 25. Phil Windley: Which Mobile Device Should I Buy? Earlier this week, while trying to sip from a firehose of feedback, Ed Vielmetti pointed out that the BBC river derived from their UK Edition, and that there was more in the World Edition. So it went on my to-do list, and this morning I was able to find them and now they're tributaries. Why carry the water, David? David Weinberger: "If FOO doesn't make an effort to be diverse, the old boys will just naturally become better friends because they spent 2.25 days camping, eating and peeing together." As long as you keep carrying their water you'll be peeing with them. The minute you say something honest and honorable, you're out. This is why the tech industry is so rotten. Tatoo this on your forehead: It only works when it's open to all comers. No matter how much of an "effort" O'Reilly makes, a closed community is still closed.
By keeping it nice and closed, and keeping everyone you invite too scared to say what's obvious, you make sure that this little euphoria you think you're having will pop at the first sign of trouble. There's nothing sustainable about what you all are doing. You need to invest as you're spending, but there's none of that going on. If you have any guts insist that Tim ask me to keynote his Web 2.0 conference and I'll lay out a roadmap for investment. That'll be a good first step toward insurance against this being a bubble. Why the title works In a perfect world every item would have a unique guid. In a better than perfect world, not only would they all have unique guids, but they'd all be permalinks. In an even better world, if an item appeared in two or more feeds it would have the same guid (and it would also be a permalink). But it's not a perfect world, and even if you put it in the spec that it must work the best possible way (as the Atom 1.0 spec did) there's no guarantee that it will actually work that way. But it sure would be nice if it did!
You can do a decent job of figuring out if you've seen an item before and not show it to the user if you look at the title of the story. Like the situation I describe above, it ain't perfect, but then neither is anything else in the world. Why the title works... I noticed that headline writers tend to be creative, they don't come up with different headlines when a story appears in more than one feed, so I tried using that as the guid, it worked! Poof there go the dupes. Now I'm sure you'll miss some articles as headlines get re-used, but I've found that it's much more likely to go the other way. As a day goes by the editors play with the titles, making slight, subtle editorial changes. I have a table that tracks this, and it can get really humorous. An inside peek into the mind of an editor. Anyway I thought I should share this bit. Have a great Saturday!
Harish Rao: "Nicco's recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto." Scoble is hosting a no-foo no-fight at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay tomorrow at 2PM. Mike Arrington proposes the creation of an open API for job boards. "I don't want to have my own garden, a sort of mini monster.com. I want to be a part of an ecosystem." Amen. Guardian: Dipping into the River of News.
BTW, even Republicans can now agree that Dean got it right, no matter how galling it must be to admit you were wrong. What if we had never gone into Iraq? Would the country, the region be better off than it is now? Obviously, no matter how bad Saddam was, his crippled and contained regime was preferrable to the bloodbath that Iraq is now; and come on, we all know it's going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever does. We're not the idiots the Republicans make us out to be. And never mind Iraq for a minute, what about the US? Isn't the President's first responsibility to America? There's no doubt we'd be better off if we weren't fighting a war in Iraq. Something to think about when pulling the lever in November. I told Nicco he was going the wrong way. People are going to be leaving the Republican Party in droves. It's like buying a house as the market is collapsing (which I just did, btw). Buying Republican stock right now is a bad investment. Denise Howell on legal issues raised by the rivers. Steve Garfield is testing a Nokia 93 cell phone over wifi with the R.O.N. Yesterday Andrew Baron and Nicco Mele met in NYC. I suspect this meeting will be recorded in history books.
The Chronicle of Higher Education on Google's agreement with the University of California, via Jeff Ubois. "So Much Better" People are still saying I'm a bad person in the comments on various blog posts. It's funny how they only say that when I'm doing good, if I stay quiet and don't ship any software they aren't compelled to say how much they despise me. When it gets my blood hot, I calm down by explaining to myself that I chose to do this work knowing that the usual people would try to hitch a ride on the flow with their negativism. That's the way it works on the net. So be it. I chose to do it because I knew that the River of News method of reading news is vastly superior to the hunt and peck method. On mobile devices it's so much better that it leads to an AHA moment for everyone who tries it. Kind of the way outlining made building a slide show so much better in 1986 with MORE (thanks to Guy Kawasaki for that breakthrough idea). After this loop there will be a lot more news used on mobile devices, and that will make me happy. I know because that's what's happening with podcasting right now. Every time I hear a news organization, like NPR or ABC News, say they do broadcast and podcast, there's the evidence of some good I did for the world. And I might add, for myself. I have a much richer life because the news is flowing through open formats like MP3 and RSS 2.0. As Phil Jones suggests in a comment on this post, in the next few weeks you will indeed see a strategy emerge. The pieces will have already been invented, for sure. In many cases the invention was mine, although some people will try to say someone else did it. It won't matter because the record is out there, people who care can find out where the ideas came from. Where the software came from will be totally apparent. If you want to understand why honest people get upset when one of my ideas clicks, read Josh Bancroft's post on the subject. I think his comment is very honest and fair, and it's what I think is behind what many other people are saying. Josh wishes he was achieving the kind of success I seem to effortlessly achieve, but it only looks effortless, it's actually a lot of work. Do a search on Scripting for river of news to see how long I've been beating this drum. Also do some checking to see how long I've been trying to gain traction with a mobile version of this weblog and those created with my software. But that said, I think I understand where Josh is coming from, and believe it or not, I often feel the same way, about many of the things I have tried to promote, only to have someone else capitalize on it. I try to find the silver lining where I can, but it is indeed frustrating. You can also find that frustration in the archive of this blog. Josh, I suggest that we find ways to help each other. We both want an exciting future for news on mobile devices. Let's work together to get there. Life is too short to be putting obstacles in each others' way, imho. Foo/Nofoo A note for those going to O'Reilly's invite-only camp this weekend in Sebastapol. Remember, no open standards work. Can't do open work at a closed event. Otherwise, have a great time, enjoy the lovely California weather. Announcing the Nofoo Wiki, where influential and important people who are not going to O'Reilly's FOO Camp can sign up and be cool. Who knows, if enough people sign up maybe we can do some open standards work. Amyloo: "I'd like to come to the virtual no foo camp, but it's sort of hard for the self-esteem-challenged to self select as important and influential."
Today's Rocketboom covers the NYTimesRiver. Thanks! Realized I had not officially announced the BBCRiver. Works great on Blackberry, Treo, web-enabled mobile device. USCourts.gov: "The next time you see someone pop on the headphones and get that faraway look in his or her eyes, don't be so sure it's a tune that's beguiling them. It just may be the latest oral arguments from the Seventh Circuit." Wired: "It's easy to forget that one of the reasons people were so excited about Napster back in the day was the social networking aspect." Netflix announces its mobile site. Amazon surprises us again. EC2 does for computing what S3 does for storage. I'm scratching my head, in a good way. What does their virtual machine run? Their only code sample is in Java. Postscript: Colin Faulkingham sheds some light. Jon Udell's screencast demoing EC2. David Galbraith: "EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2."
Phil Jones: "The silliest thing, ever, is people getting all uptight because Dave is "arrogant." A union of explainers and justifiers?
The way technology works, for those who care about such things: Start with a vision you believe in, and keep trying to find ways to show others how powerful it is. Over and over, often for years. Outliners took eight years from idea to product of the year. Podcasting took four years. River of news took seven. This is opposite the myth of invention, the Eureka moment when everyone sees the idea. The moment often takes years to play out. Maybe it always does. But when you finally break through, savor the moment, and don't pay any attention to the ballast. (Also, I find that the people with the biggest problems often turn out to be competitiors. It's a dishonorable way to compete. Much better to try to give users more good stuff, not try to keep them looking at stuff they like.)
How I do a blog post from my Blackberry, in a movie. I also uploaded the movie to blip.tv. Steve Rubel: "Startups advertising on startups spells trouble." Evan Williams surveys the podcasting directory sites. Robojamie: "If less effort is required to use RSS it's use by a majority of Internet users will soar." I agree. newsrivers.com is not my site. Amazing how quickly a popular idea takes hold on the web. Ed Cone has an interesting perspective on NYTimesRiver. The German version of Wikipedia is getting gatekeepers, on an experimental basis. Experienced users will approve changes before they go live. This could cut down on vandalism, but what else will it cut down on? Just curious, what tools do people use to post to their blogs from a Blackberry or Treo? I'm hosting a mobile version of the BuzzMachine blog. Doc Searls: "The river metaphor makes me look at the supply side of blogging from a whole new perspective."
Doc Searls shows how the NYTimesRiver looks on his Treo. Ewan MacLeod explains why River of News is the way to go, especially on mobile devices. An interesting discussion has developed on Phil Torrone's Flickr post. Jeff Jarvis: "Just the news, sir. And keep it flowing." There's a teeny little leak in Dan Farber's write-up. BetterBadNews on social networks of investors. NYTimesriver on TechMeme. Frank Barnako: "Dave Winer is a bit like Jack Webb." Predictable backlash from people who say that reading news on a Blackberry is nothing new, they've been doing it for years. I'm sure they have, and people were listening to MP3s on Macs and PCs before podcasting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a turning point for audio on the Internet. Henri Asseily: "The Blackberry works for reading news." Phil Torrone: "Nice work, I usually have a load of RSS readers on my phone, but the NYTimesRiver is something I'll bookmark on all of them." What's new for your Blackberry
This was followed by a few weeks of experimentation, until I reached nirvana, on Saturday, on a trip on BART, where cell coverage is pretty good, I was able to read a few stories from the Sunday New York Times, and I knew this was it, this is going to be huge, these devices work for reading news. Now the question is how to promote it so that all the people who can benefit from it hear about it. I've not been so excited or so sure about a new direction for mobile technology since podcasting in June 2004. I'm sure we'll look back on this as a turning point for mobile news. Where does it make sense? Certainly for urban bus and rail commuters where there's good cell coverage. And for people who travel by air, many of whom have devices that are capable of reading news, but they may not know it yet. Scoble: "When I was in the hospital room with Maryam's mom I could just go to the New York Times and it came down fast and in a readable form." A movie shows how to read the river on the Blackberry. Coming next, same treatment for the BBC, and then who knows...? Zero setup is the key feature Predictable backlash from people who say that reading news on a Blackberry is nothing new, they've been doing it for years. I'm sure they have, and people were listening to MP3s on Macs and PCs before podcasting, but that doesn't mean podcasting wasn't a turning point for audio on the Internet. The fact is that today most people with web-capable mobile devices aren't reading news on them. I'd wager it isn't because they don't want to, I think many of them do. If it were easy enough. The problem with most of the methods people talk about is that they require a lot of effort to set up, or only work in certain contexts, or are a lot of work to use. NYTimesRiver is good because it requires no setup, one size fits all, and it delivers consistent value, and coverage. It would even be innovative for the desktop, because of the zero setup. People get confused with difficulty to program and utility. It wasn't an act of great programming prowess to get this software running. But try it out on someone on an airplane or bus with a Blackberry or Treo, and watch their eyes light up, their chin drop. That's hard to do too. Someday people will understand why simplicity in this stuff is essential, that's when it takes off, when it's reduced to its most basic value, and delivered in a package that can quickly gain buzz and critical mass. Last year's revenue: $2.3 million
Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions. People think blogs are about advertising, and I would agree, but they're thinking in terms of clicks and eyeballs, and I'm thinking of technology that's created using the intelligence of community participation. Want to see how it's done? It's here in the archive of this blog. Don't have the time to read the archive? Read today's blog. We will get a whole new flow built here, through persistent experimentation, refinement, listening, promoting, thinking, and looping. Is there money in this? A lot more than most people think, because they're still thinking in 20th century terms. I don't share this space with hitch-hikers. I use my blog for my own ideas. They make good money. No point diluting what I have to say. Want to know more? I wrote about it on August 3. Spike Lee's New Orleans I watched the first installment of Spike Lee's story of New Orleans and Katrina. It's been a long time since TV gripped me so emotionally and not let go. I went back to New Orleans in December to see what had happened, but I didn't understand what had been there during the flood, what had already been cleaned up. Where I drove there had been bodies floating. The water was so deep, I never had a sense of how impossible it was for humans to cope with that. How many people died, and here a year later, how can we put that in perspective. We weren't attacked, the deaths were largely preventable. It is important to look back, to remember that last year we lost of one our cities, and many thousands of our people lost their homes. A culture died, and our political life is a void until we really feel that. It has never happened in the United States before. We've never lost a whole city like that. The tragedy is still here, today, in our hearts. Perhaps we think we've moved on, but I don't think we have. New Orleans was part of America. It was part of us.
PodCamp in Boston, September 9-10. Rising Tide/New Orleans, August 25-27. New header graphic, a hiking trail in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Niall Kennedy: "SF Tech Sessions meets this Wednesday evening in San Francisco to learn about the latest trends in distributing large media files." The Onion: "Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday." Mitch Kapor: "Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet."
A more careful explanation of the redirect issue. David Hornik's view of the Friday TechCrunch party. One thing to be thankful for is that in all the reviews of Friday's party, very few said it was about Web 2.0. We seem to have gotten that out of the way. Arrington's parties are inclusive, and net-net that's a good thing. Web 2.0, as designed by O'Reilly and Battelle, excludes lots of good people, and that's a bad thing. I'd argue it's even bad for O'Reilly and Battelle, but I'm not so worried for them. New mobile stuff Try reading the mobile versions of these popular weblogs on your BlackBerry, Treo, or web-enabled cell phone. Not bad, eh? We're getting somewhere, it seems.
Andrew Keen's interview with yours truly. People say it's pretty good, I haven't listened yet.
August in Berkeley is so temperate. At 9PM, flipped through the cable news stations, CNN, MSNBC, Fox. They were all running JonBenet stories. You'd never know there's a war going on, and an election in less than 90 days. I rewrote the PDA version of Scripting News. It now reads from top to bottom, much easier than the old method which put each item on its own "page."
Salon: "Watching Spike Lee's four-hour epic on Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans Arena with my neighbors, I felt awed, exhausted and heartbroken -- and more convinced than ever that somebody should go to jail for what happened here." 12/15/05: New Orleans after Katrina.
According to Andrew Grumet, Treo's can play MP3s (with a bit of messing around). As far as I know, Blackberries can't. Jeff Jarvis: "Small is the new big." Steve Martin: "Immediately after the show, we're all gonna go out.. and get really small!" Dare Obasanjo: "Kiko was a feature, not a full-fledged online destination let alone a viable business." Scott Rosenberg: "Calendaring doesn't easily lend itself to large-scale social interaction and wisdom-of-crowds behavior." Wired News sent a reporter to Mountain View to try out Google's wifi coverage. They got through. I tried it at a restaurant on El Camino near Castro, and Google appeared in the menu, but the signal was too weak to connect. Hmmm. Did Valerywag get hacked?
Talking Point Memo notes that the NY Times has gotten side-tracked by the JonBenet story too. Emotional BBC interview with Sha Xu Kang, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. I recorded the last half of the interview as an MP3. The quality varies (there was static on the radio), but it's well worth a listen. Scoble: "Now I can read TechCrunch while walking around tonight's TechCrunch party."
I'm having lunch today in Mountain View, so I expect to get a chance to try out the Google wifi coverage of the city and will report here. When I went to Yahoo Maps to get directions, they were able to show me there's no traffic on either route (Bay Bridge, or Dumbarton), and they happily sent the driving directions to my cell phone. Now, to really get cool, they'd send them to my Toyota with GPS. Google Reader has a mobile feature. Jeff Cohen: "In a media system dominated by entertainment conglomerates, it's no accident that we're served up a steady stream of 'top' stories saturated by sex, violence and celebrity."
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I'm still hoping 
The second half of today's 
Some wise old fart once 
We were excited about WAP in 
Heads-up: 
When I got my Blackberry, at first it was culture shock, I wanted my Plain Jane Nokia back, but after a while I got used to using it as a phone, then fell in love with it because it did email so well, but I wanted more, I wanted news.
Of course I wasn't happy that 
