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Charles Jade: Why can't Apple blog? I'm with Josh Marshall, Kerry has nothing to apologize for. Olbermann: "Kerry called them stupid and they were too stupid to know he called them stupid." I think in retrospect, the Democrats came to life when Bill Clinton did the interview with Chris Wallace at Fox. Throwing punches is something people don't expect from Demos, and it's refreshing. Kerry said something that is totally, obviously true. Bush better watch out if he decides to make this an issue, it's likely to backfire. All Kerry has to say is that he'll apologize after Bush apologizes for the deaths of 2800 young Americans in Iraq. Hil introduces the RSS Pumpkin. Ha!
There was a political bloggers meetup at Berkman last night in Cambridge. Ed Cone interviews PodShow CEO, Ron Bloom. HDMI question I bought and HDMI to HDMI cable to connect my Denon DVD player to the Sony TV. I tried hooking the two together, but no luck, when I clicked through all the video sources on the TV, the output of the DVD, which I could hear, never showed up on the screen. I've read all I could find in the two manuals with no clues. Any ideas?
SlingPlayer for Mac OS X Public Beta Download. Scoble: "I don't read separate feeds anymore. I just read everything in one long continuous scrolling Window." There's a lot of back-channel discussion of Apple's option backdating problem, and the extent to which it involves Steve Jobs. Late last week, I heard that a major business publication is working on this story, but they're hesitating, for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Jobs. Ars Technica: Steve Jobs knew about options backdating. Google search for "options backdating apple." Mark Cuban reposts an anonymous email from the Pho mail list about the terms of the Google acquisition of YouTube. Synopisis: A fair amount of the money goes to settle copyright infringment suits. NY Times: Circulation Plunges at Major Newspapers.
Pictures taken at this evening's Cybersalon in Berkeley. AP: "Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said in a campaign debate Thursday that she would have voted against the war had she known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction." Wired: "Some of the web's more popular 'milblogs' -- blogs maintained by present or former active duty military personnel -- are going quiet following a renewed push by U.S. military officials to scan sites for security risks." National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, Jan 12-14. When I moved into the new house I bought a LaCrosse Atomic wall clock. It looks just like any other wall clock, except it has a radio built in, that tunes into a government broadcast frequency that sets the clock to the correct time every night. Last night it got a signal that it was off by one hour and corrected itself. One more thing not to worry about! It worked. Does Apple have a blogging policy? Apple is conspicuous among technology companies in having no one in the blogosphere from the company speaking about the company in an official or unofficial capacity. I'm sure there are many other big and small companies who aren't present, but for a company whose presence is so large, it's unusual they play almost no role in the conversation. Recently, an ex-Apple person, Chuq von Rospach, wrote eloquently and sincerely about this, and Scoble, who was basically Microsoft's first blogger (and a former employee of mine at UserLand) called him on it, and I have some facts that aren't part of either of their stories, I was there at the dawn of Apple's blogging policy, on two occasions, and imho the truth is closer to what Scoble says that to what Chuq says.
The second part of the story involves Kate Adams who I first met at the Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, in 1997 (long before she was blogging). Kate was then quite outspoken, she worked in the Quicktime group at Apple, one of the successes of the company through the dark years, and one of a small number of technologies to survive at Apple 3.0. Kate was at a company-wide meeting in Cupertino, shortly after Jobs took over, and sent me an email for publication without attribution, enthusiastically explaning what Steve had said. I published the email on Scripting News, without identifying the source. The next day she was called into Steve Jobs's office at Apple, they knew who sent the email because they had written a script watching for mail going to me from inside Apple. Not surprisingly, I stopped getting mail from people at Apple. My sources (Kate wasn't the only one) dried up. To Chuq's point, Kate wasn't in any way acting as a spokesperson for the company. It was clear from the writing, this was an employee not a spokesperson. I didn't identify her as a spokesperson. So if the policy wasn't to be a spokesperson, it's pretty clear Kate didn't violate it. Also, when Scoble was blogging for Microsoft, most of the time he wasn't blogging as a company spokesman (it's possible there were times when he was coordinating with Microsoft PR). In general people understood that he was blogging as a person. It was pretty clear, because at times he would say he thought management was wrong. Not too many spokespeople do that. Same with all the other bloggers. If Ray Ozzie, on the other hand, were to resume his blog, that would be different, we would assume, since he's an officer of the company, that his writing was official. So if Apple really believes what Chuq says, they can relax a bunch, the blogosphere is smart enough to discern between a spokesperson and a plain old person. An account of the Kate Adams/Steve Jobs meeting (with at least one fact wrong) appeared in Alan Deutschman's book about Jobs, published in 2001. An excerpt of Deutschman's book ran in Salon.
What year was this picture taken in? CNN had a quiz a few days ago asking when was email invented. It was multiple choice, and the earliest date was 1981, which turns out to be their answer. They put up a picture of Eric Allman, saying he was the inventor. Oy, such is the state of journalism today. I think 1981 was the year CNN was invented. Email goes back to, at least, the early 70s. I used email at the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and it was't new then. Wikipedia: "E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate." Someday search will be old too Many years ago, when the Internet was still the domain of geeks, researchers and college students, the smart folks often said that the opportunities for new software companies were over, it simply required too much scale to compete in an industry dominated by Lotus, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate. Now it's clear how ridiculous that was, even though it was correct. The next layer comes on not by building on the old layer (a trick, the guy you're building on will eat your lunch), or re-doing what they did (what the naysayers correctly say you can't do), but by starting from a different place and building something new, and so different that the old guys don't understand it and don't feel threatened by it. At first, the Internet, the market dominated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon (and others) was about the web, a publishing environment, then it became two-way, and search developed as a core but adjunct feature, much as the OS of a personal computer is part of the package, but the spreadsheet, word processor and other productivity apps are really what it was about. There will be new technology enterprises that make the search engine as humdrum as the desktop OS is today. Bet on it and win. Think that all innovation must come in the form of applications of search and you'll be left in the dust.
Well, the St Louis Cardinals kicked the Detroit Tigers in the ass, and won the 2006 World Series. That's it for baseball this year. See you again in April. I was just tripping out on KFOG 10@10, trying to find the list of songs for tonight, and damn if they don't have an RSS 2.0 feed. Man. Is that cool or what! Today they played ten great songs from 1968, which was a big year for me -- I was 13. Wow. They chose a Jimi Hendrix song as the best song for 1968, I would have picked the Simon & Garfunkel song, America, if only because it's such a great road trip song, and it brings back so many great memories. I'm sure everyone else put that song on their favorite tunes for long driving trips cassette tape. NY Times: "If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction." TechCrunch compares traffic for Rocketboom & Ze Frank. And so does Heather Green at BusinessWeek. HDWorld, Nov 29-30, New York. Tim Berners-Lee: "Making standards is hard work." Darren Barefoot has an apparently scandalous example of a company (one that lots of people respect) playing a nasty game of "we own your ass." Rob Hof is getting Democratic spam too. I still am, too. All my efforts to unsub have been for naught. A bunch of people say that this Mac update may fix the random shutdown problems. I have installed it on my MacBook, of course, but I had already had my computer repaired. Apple hasn't said anything that this relates this fix to the problems widely reported on the net. If it does fix the problem, Apple still gets an failing grade for communication with customers. Sending other people out to speak on your behalf is very Republican.
Lobby of the W Hotel in Seattle. Evan Williams announces that Odeo is finished, and he's formed a new company. Next, obvious question -- will Adam give back the money he raised for PodShow? Kevin Kelly has been coming up with some great stuff lately on his Cool Tools blog. John Robb has a book coming in April on the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization.
Marc Canter asks about support by aggregator developers of media formats in RSS feeds. Dell Hell, in a JibJab-like infomercial. The OGQ tool? Something that's missing in Google's repertoire of information searching tools. It's something between Technorati, Google News, and Google itself. Think of it as the old-girlfriend query tool. Let's say I used to date a woman named Tammy. From time to time I wonder what's up with her. So I do a search, and find the same old links. I want to find all the new stuff. I don't just want to search blogs, so it's not what Technorati does. I don't just care if she makes the news, so it isn't what Google News does. For extra credit, I'd like it to come in RSS format so I can teach my aggregator to do this for me automatically. BTW, once we get this feature, I predict the same kind of backlash that came when Facebook added rich RSS support. All of a sudden lurkers will have a new advantage, and the lurkees might not be happy about it. Iraq and incentives Listening very carefully to podcast and broadcast discussions about the war in Iraq between Washington policy-makers, there is a lot of subtlety that's missed in the crude discussion of "stay the course" vs "cut and run." I'm sure we're just getting an inkling of what's going on there, and to even get that inkling you have to listen a lot and carefully. Here are some things to consider. We're encouraging the supposed unity government of Maliki to work with other factions, but he isn't doing it. He doesn't really have much of an incentive, as long as we prop him up, pay his bills, provide him with body guards, why should he do anything at all? Further, we're pumping billions of dollars into Iraq, how is that being spent and who is getting it? How much of that money is being used to fund the various factions in the soon-to-be civil war? Lots. 60 Minutes had a report this Sunday about $800 million that disappeared from Iraqi defense appropriations. The money is being given to people we don't know. And some of them are arming themselves and fighting against the government, but most of them are just ignoring the government, it's so weak and innefective. Anyway, there's a point to all this. Clearly behind the scenes, when the Americans put pressure on Iraqis, they're telling them to work with each other. Even the Republicans say that, that in order for Iraq to have a chance of working, each of the factions must compromise. But here's the disconnect. Here at home, the Republicans completely disenfranchise the Democrats and people who vote for Democrats. Every bit of disagreement is cast as cowardice or disloyalty. Most of us aren't going to become Republicans. So how can we expect the Iraqis to do what we ourselves don't? The answer -- it's unreasonable to expect them to. God knows why America should care about change in Iraq, but Bush insists that we must. So if we want Iraq to reform, Bush should stop throwing dirt at anyone who dares to disagree with him, because he so desperately needs to be disagreed with, and we should form some kind of coalition government of Republicans and Democrats that decides how to get our country out of the mess we're in, in Iraq. Demspam Meanwhile, the Democrats have discovered the power of spam. Somehow they got my "real" email address into their database (I probably corresponded with someone who works for Democrat causes) and now I'm getting a few spam emails every day that get through the spam filters from idiots like John Kerry and Barak Obama. I call them idiots to emphasize that, with me, spam does not endear me to you, it makes it impossible for me to give you money or support. I've tried five times to unsub, but they seem to ignore the request, like any good spammer. Would someone give the Internet guys down at Democratic Party HQ a kick in the butt for me. Thanks. Postscript: I got an email from a tech guy at the DNC saying the email came from the Kerry organization not the DNC. He said: "The DNC does not buy email addresses or spam people."
Salon: U.S. generals call for Democratic takeover. A bit of a smackdown between Ze Frank and Rocketboom. Competition is inevitable, and a good thing, imho. 67MB movie demo of my entertainment system. Why doesn't Howard Stern have a podcast? (Or does he?) Grace Davis explains why "we don't mind the crazy ass real estate prices and earthquakes." O'Reilly has a $7.99 booklet about OPML written by Amy Bellinger. I'm sure it's good, Amy does good work. I was checking out Google's new custom search engine feature (released today) and was surprised to see them support OPML format for "annotations." Screen shot. My TV has its own computer Kent Newsome: "No one other than a honking nerd wants to watch TV in a little window on a computer, when a big screen HDTV plasma is sitting 20 feet away."
But Kent is missing something that I think a lot of other people miss. His big honkin plasma TV probably has a PC video-in jack on the back, and while the UI to switch between the cable box and PC is klunky, once you learn how to do it, it's not difficult, and it opens another door that's totally worth opening. I know, because in addition to HD, I also bought a Mac Mini with a 120GB hard drive to watch movies that come from its hard disk. I'm developing quite a collection, thanks to Netflix and Handbrake. But it also means I don't need an aggregator from Tivo, I just use the same one I always use, a copy of Radio running on one of my servers in Dallas. Why? Because my TV (through the Mac) also has a net connection.
HD and Macs and cable, Bluetooth (for the keybaord and mouse), RSS and TCP/IP. All these techonologies come together in my home entertainment center. I don't watch TV on my computer screen, but I do watch my computer on my TV screen, if you get what I mean. BTW, Engadget has an excellent HD website, they tell you what's on, and about new technology that's relevant to HD users. Dave Zatz wonders whether it's time to get HD. Yes, yes, yes. If you want to help figure all this stuff out, we need you to have the new eyes that you get from HD. Think about it this way. If there was an upgrade available for your eyes that gave you 3D vision when you just had 2D, would you pay $1500 for that? Yes, it is that big a difference, imho. A 67MB movie demo of my entertainment system. Another Republican for Cut and Run Lindsey Graham: "We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working." Seems the Republicans are finally ditching Dubya. I love what Nancy Pelosi said at the end of her 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, when asked if she would go for impeaching Bush after she becomes Speaker of the House. "Wouldn't they just love it, if we came in and our record as Democrats coming forth in 12 years, is to talk about George Bush and Dick Cheney? This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough for me."Those were the last words in the interview, and they reverberate. No matter what, we've got the change we were looking for, even if the Republicans retain control of Congress. They can't recover in two years from the kind of internal warfare they're waging against each other now. No matter what, Bush is already the lamest of lame ducks.
10,000-plus planetary hacks. News.com: "Asus, Planex and QNap will include BitTorrent's peer-to-peer technology in products such as wireless routers, media servers and network storage devices."
Brier Dudley on Microsoft and RSS. Doc Searls lives on the west coast but feels at home on the east. Me too. Looks like the President is laying the groundwork for his own Cut And Run strategy in Iraq. As he prepares to wave the white flag in surrender, it all seems like a flip flop. Nahh, that's what the Democrats do! Seriously, imagine if we were as focused on rebuilding and defending New Orleans as we are with Iraq. What a mistake in priorities. We should be preparing for a big terrorist attack in the US too. The idea that we're fighting them in Iraq so we don't have to fight here is total bullshit. We're hiding in Iraq, not fighting. And the people who are killing us and Iraqis aren't terrorists, it's a civil war. In many cases they're the people we trained to be in the police and the army.
NY Times: "Google sometimes operates in a way that almost seems to invite legal scrutiny."
Inside Google: "Ze Frank decided to help monetize his vlog by letting readers buy digital rubber duckies and other things on his pages, but Google did not approve."
"Surrender and wave the white flag," is the Rove slogan for this election. George Stephanopoulos asked the President to name a single Democrat who wants to surrender and wave a white flag. Hemm and haw. Thanks, that's the right question. What a fucking coward. Why can't we have an election where we talk about something other than Karl Rove's marketing slogan. Bill Frist used the term on CNN later in the morning. Republicans are chicken.
Olbermann: The beginning of the end of America. Jeff Ubois: How Accessible is Historic Television?
Gene Gable brought a CD of pictures from Seybold with him to yesterday's memorial. There weren't many pictures, but I did take one as we were finishing up, the light was so pretty, and the people were intently focused. It was also the first time we used the new living room.
Some people are cat people and others are dog people. Naked Jen is a dog person. Milverton Wallace: How the Web is socialising journalism. PodcastConUK in London, November 18. Dan Conover has a wonderful block diagram that explains how the Internets work. Harry McCracken, a reporter at PC World, has a long story of MacBooks that randomly shut down. Apparently it wasn't just the earliest ones that suffer from the flaw. Apple and its customers A brief report on my MacBook. Two days after it returned from repair, it hasn't shut down randomly, not even once. It is still running hot. And it could be my imagination, but it seems to be using the battery less efficiently. I will be able to measure this by trying to watch a 1.5 hour movie straight through. It used to be able to do this. Now I have some thoughts on the apparently escalating problem with randomly shutting down MacBooks. It appears the problem worsens over time. I bought my MacBook in the first week it was out, and I was one of the first to experience the problem. So it doesn't seem that Apple is out of the woods yet, only they know how many Macs suffer from the problem, and apaprently it isn't just the first ones sold that do, based on McCracken's report. And it raises bigger questions about the relationship between Apple and its customers. First, does the company have pride in its product? And second, does it think its customers are smart for choosing it? If both are true, it's up to the company to make the second statement true. A computer that doesn't work, no matter how much better the software is, or the basic design, is not a smart choice. So by not taking care of it quickly, as if the customers matter, Apple makes the customers stupid for having chosen the product. Sooner or later the smart people have to go elsewhere, even if they would prefer to use a Mac. In the almost two months that my MacBook didn't work, I was forced to use a Windows XP laptop. Now I'm trying to integrate the MacBook back in my life, but it's just as difficult now as it was when I first made the transition from Windows to the Mac. One of these days (I hope) one of the PC manufacturers will figure out how to make a machine that's as nice to use as a Mac and as reliable as PCs are. Then Apple will have to take these issues seriously. Of course I would think better of the company if it took the issues seriously before they had to. And one thing I'd really like to see -- no more commecials about how Macs are more reliable than PCs. That adds insult to injury, and it shows how totally out of touch the company is with its own product.
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day...
Ray Slakinski has a randomly shutting down MacBook. ABC News has a bunch of new podcasts, including This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Liz Gannes, who writes for GigaOm, has a defective MacBook, like so many others. Yesterday I mistakenly reported that the MacBook belonged to Om Malik. Drew Domkus, of Dawn & Drew fame, also has a MacBook that randomly shuts down.
Highly recommend the Countdown podcast, re the Military Commissions Act of 2006, signed into law yesterday.
News.com: "Bloggers are showing signs of outrage and amazement at the way Apple is handling the issue." CNET reviews MSIE7, released today. Add to the list of reasons not to switch -- doesn't run on Mac OS. News.com: "More than 1500 TV stations in the United States are now broadcasting HD signals over the air." Grace Davis: "I am one tough mofo." YouTube videos filed under "Mac Sucks." Julie Leung has a randomly shutting down MacBook. Om Malik has a randomly shutting down MacBook. Every time the Mets make it to the playoffs there's a feeling of hope, it's a good feeling, but when it dawns on you that it might not happen this year, that's not a good feeling, and that's how I feel right now. I would really like it if the Mets made it to the World Series. If they don't, life will go on, of course, I hope, knock wood, praise Murphy. But life would be enhanced immeasurably by a Mets World Series, imho How to improve professional reporting Continuing the thread about news in the future, and what comes after Who Knew What When, I wonder if people caught that I'm trying to help. It may not be what you want to hear, but isn't it my job, as it is yours, to say what I see, and tell you what I think? I hope it's obvious that I think news reporting can be done better. A few simple guidelines follow, which I hope are helpful. 1. Encourage your sources to have blogs. One simple way to do that is to de-emphasize the phone interview, and take quotes straight off the blogs of experts in the area you're reporting on. They'll get the message pretty quickly, if you want to be quoted (and most people still do) it's more likely if you have a blog. 2. If a person you're quoting has a blog, point to it from your piece (if not from the print edition, from the web version). 3. Speaking of pointers, shorten your URLs through redirection (this also lets you gather stats on which links your readers found interesting). So for example, if you're going to point to another reporter's article, like this, you can, instead, use a shortened URL, like this. Now you can include more web pointers in your print articles. (Note: I'd recommend you establish your own service, not use Tinyurl.) 4. Start your own blog, point to it from every one of your print stories. Even if you have no idea what you're going to write there, start it, so you're over that hump. 5. Float ideas for stories on your blog, much as you would with a person on your staff. See what kind of response you get. Most reporters don't have a good feel for how their readers think, or even if people are reading their articles. If I were a professional reporter, this is what I'd want to know first. People throw around a lot of theories about what sells papers, but what do they base their beliefs on? When they say people prefer news about pedophiles to news about bribes and payoffs, they don't really have a strong foundation for that belief. One common objection is that you tip off your competitors, but I think, really, reporters worry too much about this. Readers don't care if someone stole your idea. And sure, there are some ideas you can't float, for legal or ethical reasons, so don't. 6. Back to sources having blogs, I'd consider hosting those blogs. This is an idea I've pitched to Martin Nisenholtz at the NY Times, first in 2002, and a couple of times since. How it would work -- when a person is quoted in a Times piece, a few days after the article runs, a person from the publishing side contacts them, congratulates them on being quoted in the Times, and asks if they want a blog. No strings attached, you can say anything you want on your blog, no editorial review, and no cost to you. We get to run ads on your blog, they won't be intrusive, much as we run ads on columns by regular NY Times columnists. The reason this works is that it includes the reporters in the vetting, ultimately it's their decision who gets to blog under the corporate masthead, which is important in an organization where the talent is so important to its success. But they also have to deal with competiton from a new source, their sources. I think it's really clever, and the first news organization that does this will have a leg up on all the others. 7. Finally, as you learn, share what you learn with your readers. Sure some will snark at you, but that's been going on since the beginning of time (read the Letters to the Editor if you don't believe me). And you'll be teaching your competitors too, but that's good -- it's called leadership, and everyone wants that. Basically, it's been my experience that the more you share of what you learn, the more you will learn. Disclaimer: I am looking for a job as CTO or Chief Scientist at a professional publisher that wants to make a strong transition to the new environment. So here I practice what I preach, I'm floating ideas in advance of using them.
An incredible story of a Nashville hit-and-run told by Nick Bradbury, one of the victims. Journal News: "It may be the end of an era, but gauging by the number of customers yesterday at Tower Records in Nanuet, the iconic music store may close with more of a whimper than a bang." LA Times: "A commission backed by Bush has agreed that 'stay the course' is not working." Doc Searls: "Yesterday I heard from an Apple enterprise customer who had recently bought 80 Macbooks. Ten of them, so far, have had to bo back for heat, shut-down or freezing problems." How pros report the news A lot of people paint a Mr Smith Goes to Washington picture of investigative reporting, and maybe sometimes it does work that way, but really, not very often. There aren't too many Woodwards and Bernsteins. Most of the reporting that goes on is pretty mundane workaday stuff, that follows a pretty simple template. 1. Get an idea. It could come from reading a colleague's article at another paper (news stories tend to come in droves, once an idea is reported by one publication, it can often be repeated by others). 2. Make a handful of phone calls, ask people what they think. Write down some of what they say. The parts you don't quote might be important to what the person thinks, but you can't write it all down. Also at this point very often errors get introduced, also known as the "misquote." The reporter may or may not understand the gist of what the person is saying, but that's not important, because neither will the reader. Look for the juicy quote, that's what they pay you the big bucks for. It doesn't matter, emphatically, if the quote reflects the beliefs of the person you're quoting. You're trying to catch them saying something interesting, and that's usually something embarassing, either to themselves, or someone else. Or something you can make sound embarassing (or stupid) by putting it after something that sounds reasonable or intelligent. 3. Do some searching on the Internet to get some impressive-sounding statistics. 4. Now it's time to write your lead and your close. See if you can find the "middle ground." Pick two extreme positions, and imply or directly say that the truth lies somewhere between. Even if the question is something that is true or false, like the sun revolves around the earth, or the moon is larger than the sun (it looks that way, doesn't it, and perception is everything, they say). The new way of writing the news The Internet is The Great Disintermediator. Everywhere you go, it's taking out the middle man, the intermediary. You see it with real estate, travel, car buying, every kind of commerce. When I went down to Magnolia to buy a fancy Denon all-in-one home theater sound system last week, I went in armed with certain knowledge that I could get the product I wanted on "the Internet" for 30 percent less than they were asking for it, in-store. So they took 20 percent off the price (I felt it was fair to pay for their overhead). A win-win. I could have bought the product without going to the local store, but I wanted the service they offered, so I paid a fair price for it. But before the Internet, there were a lot more stereo stores, esp in a big college town like Berkeley. Same with professional reporters. Here's why. I can go direct to the people they call, go to their blogs to find out what they think, and I get more than the sensational soundbite, I can get a detailed, reasoned, backed-up discussion. I have a better chance of finding out what's really going on this way. I really believe that. I practice this myself. There are some things I'm expert at. And some experiences I have that are newsworthy even though I'm not an expert. When I went to the DNC in 2004, I wasn't an expert at the political process, but I brought a digital camera, a MP3 recorder, and my laptop, so I took pictures, did podcasts, and blogged. Put enough normal people in a room covering an event, and you've got coverage. And in my recent experience with MacBooks, a few reporters offered to do phone interviews, which I declined. I said I had written it all up on the blog, all of it is on the record, for attribution, and having a pretty good idea how the interview process works, and the results it produces, the only rational thing for me to do these days is to decline the interview. I predict that more and more people will do that, unless the pros get their act together. I spoke in shorthand on Friday When I said "It's easier for readers to become reporters than it is for reporters to become readers" I meant that reporters, if they want to be relevant in the future, will have to understand what the people at Magnolia understand. They could have refused to give me 20 percent off, and I would have bought the product on the Internet for 30 percent off. But they understood something that most reporters and their supporters don't understand -- the readers didn't have a choice just a few years ago, but now we do, we can go direct to their sources, to their blogs, to find out what they think, we don't need the reporter to assemble the sources for us. To not recalibrate accordingly is professional suicide. No doubt some will commit suicide. There's a Tower Records down the street from Magnolia, and on Friday they had guys out on the street with sandwich signs urging us to go to their closeout sale. Someone there must have thought there will always be record stores, Internet or no Internet.
News.com: "Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, says he will launch a spinoff of the free site, called Citizendium. It will include user registration and editorial controls to govern user-submitted articles, unlike the free-for-all submission process that reigns on Wikipedia."
I played hookie this afternoon and saw The Departed, which may be the best movie ever made. A long film, the story and the acting hold your interest without letting up for one second. Beautifully edited, an incredible cast, always surprising, often moving. A bit on the violent side, but not without preparing you for it. Patrick Phillips: "The editor of Business 2.0 is asking every journalist at his magazine to create a blog. And in a possible first for a major publisher, the participating bloggers at the Time Inc. title will be paid based on their traffic."
After waiting for a half hour, I gave up. They still have my computer, I have no idea when it'll be ready, and I have no way, short of making an appointment and driving down there (next available slot -- 4PM) of finding out if and when I'll get the computer back. I don't understand why people love this company, I prefer their computers, but it's the most user-hostile company I've ever had to deal with. BTW, my first trip to the Apple store with this problem was on Sept 27. At that point, they knew what the problem was. So it's been an outage of 19 days. What if this were my primary machine? Geez. Colin Faulkingham: "I had a similar experience with Apple." When a big company puts up a "blog" it's a mistake to believe that it's actually some kind of blog. That's the take-away from Wal-Mart's supposed blog. 12/9/05: "Anyone who thinks they know what the blogosphere is about is as right as someone who thinks they know the meaning of life, and potentially as dangerous (in a not-nice way) because maybe they'll try to force you to see it their way." Sean Coon: "Would it be any wonder if Iraqi's started their own War On Terror?"
Scoble: "If I were running a search engine I'd actually come out and say 'we're gonna remove any advertiser on PayPerPost from our listings.'" Mets win, 12-5. Looking a lot better. It's now a best of 3 series with the home field advantage to the Mets.
My favorite Met, Carlos Delgado. If you're watching the game you know why. If not, I'll explain later. My favorite Met, Jose Reyes. If you're watching the game you know why. If not, I'll explain later. Jory's report on her wedding, earlier this month. Basic ingredients for a pickup brunch on a cloudy Sunday morning. Noah's bagels, sushi, cream cheese, assorted teas, orange juice, scones, bananas, sugar, lox, salt, plastic cups. In the den, Talking Heads on the stereo, Grand Hotel on the video. Jason Calacanis: "iTunes is a real pain in the neck." Ben Barren tunes into RSS and BitTorrent. Sounds like something I want to do.
That said, the Mets are still in it, they're down 2-1. The Cards need to win 2 more games to advance to the World Series. The Mets Magic Number is 3. Tonight's game starts at 5PM Pacific. Let's go Mets!
Yeah the Mets didn't look like World Champeens tonight. :-( Army News Service: "Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be." Congratulations to the Detroit Tigers, American League champions. I'm getting tons of email saying the Mac Mini does have digital audio out.
Frank Shaw: "In this world of citizen journalists, who covers the city council meetings?" Nick Carr is a snarky dude, that's for sure. I have a straight comeback. If we're still in Iraq in ten years, we'll be getting our news from regular people in the Iraqi populace, delivered via the web. Otherwise known as bloggers. Nick thinks he's disproving my point, but he's making it. AP: "Sniper fire, roadside bombs, kidnapping and murder are among the risks that Western journalists face covering the war in Iraq. Their Iraqi colleagues must cope with more: Families attacked in retribution for what they report, and possible arrest if someone believes them linked to the violence they cover."
BTW, curiously, I don't need my receiver to have an FM tuner built in, because all the stations I'm interested in have Internet webcasts. That's mainly three NPR stations: WBUR, WNYC and KCRW. There might be a couple of others that don't yet have a net presence. The Mac Mini gets it for me. Cross another analog item off the list. Here's something that seems pretty silly -- there's no digital line connecting audio from the Mac and the Denon. My settop box has this kind of connector, so when Fox broadcasts baseball in Dolby 5.1, my stereo plays what the mikes are picking up at Shea Stadium. The effect is stunning. It's as if my ears are right there in Flushing, but it seems as if my head is as big as the stadium itself. Anyway, here's the Mac, 100 percent digital from top to bottom, and the bits have to be converted to analog to be played through the digital stereo. Also, I see the day coming that MP3 compression isn't going to be good enough. ConvergeSouth starts today in Greensboro, NC.
On Countdown, they report there are now 6,000 British soldiers in Iraq. At the peak, there were 40,000. St Louis won Game 2 of the NLCS, 9-6. Oy. Fry's is selling 400GB drives for $95. I bought one. What comes after Who Knew What When Jeff Jarvis is at a conference at Harvard today about the future of news. The LA Times sent its reporters out to find out what its future is. Dan Gillmor says his readers know more than he does, of course they do, this is another way of saying that you have more than one or two readers. It's so obvious, but that's okay, people often miss what's obvious. Sometimes the more obvious it is the more people miss it. What's happening to news is what's happening to everything. The readers are becoming the writers. Anything the LA Times does that fails to embrace this phenomenon will not work. News is not like the symphony, it's like cooking dinner. And should we really be trying to save the news organizations we have? This is a serious question. I go back and forth. At breakfast yesterday, a group of us were discussing the Foley scandal. We had also watched a Bill Moyers show where they revealed the details of the Tom Delay scandal, which was much deeper and more insidious than the Foley scandal. Yet the press has focused on the less interesting one, presumably based on the assumption that the reader or viewer would not understand the Delay scandal. But be clear, it was their choice to go this route, no reader or viewer made the decision, they did. I think it was because they knew how to proceed. It was a question of Who Knew What When. Iraq, Katrina and Delay do not fit that template. So I have to wonder whether we should be concerned if CNN or MSNBC or the LA or NY Times are in trouble, if the only story they know how to report is WKWW. In any case, I've laid out the roadmap quite a few times. When we look back in a few years, I'm totally sure this will have turned out to be the way it went. In ten years news will be gathered by all of us. The editorial decisions will be made collectively, and there will be people whose taste we trust who we will turn to to tell us which stories to pay attention to. Instead of three of these, there will be thousands if not tens of thousands. One for every political persuasion, one for every mood, demographic, age range, maybe even by geography. The role of gatekeeper will be distributed, as will the role of reporter. Very few people, if any, will earn a living doing this, much as most of us don't earn a living by cooking dinner, but we do it anyway, cause you gotta eat. Change comes slowly but change comes. You can try to hold the world in place so your life continues to make sense, but the world is too big and you're too small, change comes, eventually, no matter how much you think it shouldn't. It's easier for readers to become reporters than it is for reporters to become readers.
CNN: "The chief of the British Army has called for a pullout of British troops from Iraq." The Amish have the right idea, they demolished the school where last week's tragedy took place. We should be so smart about what we call Ground Zero. Don't build a shrine there. Don't make a point of the place. Leave a hole there. Put in a park, with benches, and swings. Build a minor league baseball stadium. A venue for concerts. Don't build another skyscraper. Don't be defiant. Accept the deaths and let's move on. No more shrines. No more global war on terror. We're not the most important people on the planet.
The home theater system I bought, it's a turnkey system, recommended highly by CNET, connects to my iPod, and I like that! The system doesn't have its own hard disk, but it connects to one of mine. That's a good place to start. But their software is totally lo-rez, and how are they going to upgrade it without a net connection? At some point we'll stop buying electronics if it doesn't have easy connectivity to the systems we already have. That's why I bought a Mac Mini for my new TV, so I could find the points of frustration, where it drives me crazy that I can't connect two things together that should be able to connect.
WSJ: "Does YouTube make Google a big target for copyright suits?" Bryan Schappel: "This topic came up during the first hour of the Howard Stern show on the 10th. Howard said that loads of his material has been uploaded without permission and Artie Lange said that his DVD's have also been uploaded without permission. Both of them agree that Google will be a prime target for copyright lawsuits." AppleInsider: "Apple Computer has been granted a patent for a pretermitted feature of Mac OS X that would have allowed users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac."
Reality-check time: Iraq is having a civil war. Saddam Hussein was holding Iraq together. When Bush says Iraq is better off without him, he's wrong. When he says we're better off without him, considering the cost to the US in lives, money, and distraction, he's wrong about that too. BTW, I'm not a Democrat and I'm not running for office. It just occurred to me that the US would be better off without Mr Bush. Iraq would be better off too. Ask any Iraqi if you don't believe me. And, if we weren't stuck in Iraq we could be totally focused on rebuilding New Orleans, an American city, where Americans lost their homes, where Americans lost their lives. What utter dysfunction that we goes on with such a huge disconnect hanging over us. Iraq isn't America. Why are we fucking around in Iraq again? NY Times: "Mr Lott, a Republican and former majority leader, is one of thousands of homeowners on the Gulf Coast who have been fighting with their insurers over payments for damage in Hurricane Katrina." Josh Marshall: "They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state." CNN: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." News.com: "Notes version 7.0.2 adds support for RSS." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I was going to pre-order a Zune player, but I checked to see if it would work with a Mac, and apparently 
Shortly after Jobs took over at Apple, I got a call from him. I had never spoken with him before or since, and I had no idea the call was coming. I have spoken with Bill Gates a number of times, I've talked with ex-Presidents of the United States, with candidates for President, I even spoke once with Bill Clinton when he was the sitting President, but I was never so nervous as when I was talking with Jobs. I mostly listened. I'm convinced now that he was trying to be my friend, he was telling me what bozos the people running Apple were, something that both horrified me, and that I agreed with. He was so open in his derision, with me, basically a stranger. It really put me off. But in retrospect, perhaps I should have been more agreeable. I don't know. But he was clearly in some way reaching out to me as a blogger probably, not so much as a developer. Also, I had at the time quit the Mac, quite openly, and had no plans to go back. Today, I use nothing but Macs, which is a testimony to the quality of his work, and the choices he made back then, but at the time, I was sure he would fail, and I said so openly. Net-net, at least at the beginning, it seems as if Jobs wanted some kind of dialog with the blogosphere. 
I have a 46 inch LCD TV, made by Sony, and it's great, and it does HDTV, and I watch broadcast stuff on it regularly, like the World Series (Game 3 starts in a few hours) and serials like 
I think maybe I should write a book about how you invent and promote standards for fun and profit, because what I'm doing here is exactly what I did when I started blogging, or publishing in XML and then RSS, or started pushing audio blog posts as enclosures in my RSS feeds. You start by putting two things next to each other that you think should work together. Then you shorten the distance, and shorten it again, and keep optimizing until you have something that other people could use. Then you tell them about it, and tell them again, and again and so on until you have a standard.
I've now had HD for about a month now, and it's a life-changer. I know it sounds weird, but you look at the world differently. The Discovery channel has really jumped on HD, they have a channel called 
Highly recommend this 
In Game 7 of the NLCS, the Mets jump to a 1st inning lead on a daring 2-out double by Beltran, a walk to Delgado and a cheap (but effective) blooper to right by Wright. 1-0 Mets up. Think good thoughts. In the 2nd, the Cards scored, tying the game at 1-1. Both teams are very impressive tonight. So far one of the best played games of the 2006 post-season. 
If my receiver had an integrated HTTP server, I could tell it to switch to play music from my Mac Mini (that's Aux 3, btw). Then I could send iTunes a network Apple Event (does it 
A few years back we wrote about cars with interfaces for MP3 players, and now they're starting to make them. That's good. Okay, the next thing is to put 
