|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Scott Rosenberg: "Are we going to spend the next two years pretending that we're still 'nation-building' and 'fighting the terrorists' while American soldiers keep filling body bags and Iraqi morgues keep overflowing?" Russell Holliman says Apple still thinks it owns podcast. When Amazon says "If you order this in the next hour and pay us $3.99 extra you can have it tomorrow," they're full of it. I've now done it twice, and gotten the normal 2-day delivery. The first time I chalked it up to chance, but yesterday I went for it again, and from the tracking page, it's pretty clear the order is still sitting in their warehouse. I think they should at least (automatically) refund the $3.99 when they don't deliver. It costs me more than $3.99 of my time to file a complaint. But I'm willing to do a blog post about it. Anyone from Amazon listening? Living in Berkeley is really getting my legs, heart and lungs in shape. On yesterday's walk I decide to go straight up, from the top of Solano Ave, to see how far I could get. Well, I went all the way up to Grizzly Peak Blvd, it's straight up for about 2 miles. I'm pretty psyched, but I have no idea what I can do to top that. That's the toughest hike around here. Coming down was actually harder, my knees were all wobbly by the time I was back on flat land. I was telling a friend about an old psychadelic song from the 60s, wondering if the lyrics alone would help at all, then I found there was a video of the song up on YouTube. Voila. The Rojas-Winer-Calacanis podcast device
First, did you think I'd really go for no RSS? You gotta be kidding. That's the whole point. The trick to these devices is to simplify, to remove features, and having it be an RSS aggregator simplifies it a whole lot. Since we agree that it should have built-in wifi capability, why should it have USB? USB may be a little faster, but if I can save money and space by only having one communication interface, then I'm going that way. I don't see myself pushing content from a desktop or laptop to the device, I see it downloading on its own over wifi. I do think I'm going to have to tell it what to subscribe to over the interface, the podcast discovery mechanism really has to be on a system with a rich user interface. Wifi has plenty of bandwidth for that kind of communication. I agree that it's a good idea to stay lean and mean, but I don't accept a premise that says we have to make this work with less resources than Apple and Microsoft. Peter, Jason and myself are designers, not bankers nor are we manufacturers. That's why there are banks and plenty of Asian companies that can make devices to spec. We just need a good business person with chutzpah to rep us. I don't think there's any shortage of chutzpah between the three of us. Why can't we raise $100 million to make this baby? I know John Doerr's phone number. We used to be neighbors. One thing's for sure, if I have any say about this, we're going to zig where Apple and Microsoft are zagging. At the first sign of DRM, I'm out. It's amazing that they left this door open. The guys from Hollywood can threaten us, but my podcasts are free for copying, as are all their podcasts, as are all podcasts. This is a podcast device, so it has no DRM. Period. Non-negotiable. Another zig to their zag, which I think is a good idea, is a reasonably open design process. I don't want to do it completely open, because there are parasites out there (wish there weren't) so any really non-obvious ideas will stay off the blogs. But having a healthy public discussion is a good thing, it will make our podcast device a more powerful, more competitive product. Phil Thompson suggests a fractional horsepower HTTP server. Of course. Doh! Thomas Beutel chimes in. WSJ debate I'm participating in a Wall Street Journal debate today. It's an interesting process, better than the usual interview, because you get to form complete thoughts, and they have to run them verbatim. I can't say what we're debating, or who my adversary is, you'll see all that when the debate is published (online only). But I'm having a good time with this.
Naked Jen: "Last night I was out with some friends and one of them has been blogging on a site hosted by Scriptwriting Magazine. I guess their system and servers crashed and he lost his entire blog and all his posts. He's only been blogging since September, but still! Everything is gone!" Confirmed, Apple does not claim the term podcast. The University of North Carolina is looking for a professor to teach blogging in the J-school. Paul Boutin: How to fight with other bloggers. Al Jazeera: Kim to lose iPod privileges.
Phil Wolff: "Dave, the reason Skype doesn't offer Skype alerting is that Skype doesn't operate a web service or offer a 'naked Skype' client or a Skype server that can talk through the Skype P2P network." Speaking of eBay, I was wondering if The Wire character, Wee Bey, was named after eBay. He was kind of a nice guy, if you like mass murderers. Postscript: I bought a Cobalt Qube for $125 on eBay! Speaking of buying things, Edgeio just bought Adaptive Real Estate Services. You heard it here first! Guy Kawasaki: "You should become a venture capitalist after you've had the shiitake kicked out of you." Sal Taylor Kydd, the head of product for Yahoo TV thanks you for your feedback on the new site. In the meantime I switched to TV Guide, which compares favorably to the old Yahoo TV site. There's a lesson here, one that I learned in 1984, when I shipped a new product with less functionality than the one it replaced. Make sure that the new version is better than the old one, users do notice. John Furrier: "Saying that startups will burst when Google crashes is like saying that increase in interest rates will burst the housing bubble."
Stock Market 101 Yesterday's bit about Bubble Burst 2.0 got a lot of response, interestingly none of it from proponents of the bubble, i.e. analysts or investors who have a stake in perpetuating the bubble (note, I do myself, but I'm famous for shooting off my mouth even when it costs me money). And it seems that some others who comment are missing something about the stock market. Stock prices absolutely do matter, when you're talking about bubbles, because that's what bubbles are made of. Yes, a stock price is a pure product of group-think, but the whole economy is a product of group-think. If people liked freezing their asses off, real estate in the Colorado Rockies would be more expensive than real estate on the ocean in Florida. Wait a minute. Okay, you see the humor, I hope. When the bubble bursts, that which was valuable yesterday is worthless today. Or worth less (much). That's what bubbles are all about. And yes indeed, non-public companies have P/E ratios. The price of the stock is the price at the last transaction. Whether it's public or not determines the liquidity of the stock and whether bloggers and reporters know the price and can kibitz about it. But with all the regulation these days, at least in the US, you do eventually find out the price, after a company is purchased by a public company.
Thomas Hawk: "I'm scared of Google's stock price." Yahoo says they improved Yahoo TV, but imho, they broke it. The listings page, which until today was the only page I knew or cared about (they just added a bunch of community features) took a few seconds to load, now it's an Ajax thing, and it loads as you scroll. Great. There's a delay every time I hit Page Down. Now instead of finding out if there's anything on in seconds it takes minutes. That's an improvement? Mark Cuban explains why it's going to be a long time before our computers connect up to our HD TVs in HD.
New feature. Every time I save Scripting News, the content system chooses a header graphic from the collection of 78 previous graphics. It's random. You never know what you're going to get. (Update: I found a 79th. I expect I'll keep finding them for a while. I wasn't always so careful about noting the new ones.) And then there are the header graphics that never ran. Like this blowup of the white on orange XML icon. An inversion of my grandfather and his friends. A Thomas Hawk masterpiece. Emily Shurr of News.com thinks Hedy Lamarr should be one of the ten girl geeks. Makes total sense. BBC: "Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told." Paul Boutin offers "a couple of rules I learned in my career as an evil mainstream media writer." Bubble Burst 2.0
I almost wrote a piece yesterday saying that since the Web 2.0 companies aren't going public, they're safe from busting in a visible, dramatic way. I almost said it will be hard to tell when the bust comes, it'll be softer and slower, you won't hear a crash or even a pop. But I was wrong, and today we got the first rumblings of the shock that will signal the end of the bubble. Google stock will crash. That's how we'll know.
MSNBC: "NBC News is characterizing Iraq conflict as civil war; White House denies" Wired News: "The Zune only frees up tunes for a limited free sampling period -- a policy that actually interferes with the rights of artists who want people to share their works freely." Al Jazeera in the US? One of my favorite podcasts is On The Media. It's irreverent, funny, timely, intelligent, flattering, even a little flirty. It comes out every Friday afternoon, and I always take my Saturday walk with OTM. Always good food for thought.
It might seem like a small thing, but a very large segment of the Muslim world doesn't speak Arabic, and the only common language they have is English. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, they get their news in English and now Al Jazeera, speaking with an American accent, will be there. Will it be different from the Al Jazeera they see in the Middle East? Yes, according to the OTM report, it will be. It's good news for world peace, so it seems, but if you want to watch Al J in English in the US, you're can only get it on the Internet. They haven't been able to get distribution on any American cable or satellite networks. I'd love to hear an explanation why. Surely it can't because they're partisan or represent the views of terrorists? If that were true, and I kid you not, I'm not joking, they'll have to stop carrying Bush and Cheney who have wasted a lot more people than any of the terrorists they carry on Al Jazeera. We need to hear other points of view. The Judith Miller fiasco proved that even the most prestigious and supposedly courageous journalists in the US are owned by the defense industry. This seems to be a commercial decision that we, as customers, may be able to influence.
How to Make Money on the Internet, the podcast. MAKE: Open Source MP3 Player Kit.
A slow day in Berkeley with the Andrews family.
Rebecca Blood interview with Scott Rosenberg.
Podcast interview with Cecile Andrews about her new book. The University of California is looking for a dean of their graduate school of journalism. Doc Searls suggests that Google do something with Blogger. "Have a real market relationship with its most serious bloggers -- and not just with advertisers," says the Doc.
I've now completed Season 3 of The Wire. Bring on Season 4! Joel Spolsky: "In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991 - 2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product."
Something to think about: RSS Remote Control. Thanksgiving 1.0 I'm thankful that some things don't change, they stay the same, although over time it's possible to get better at doing them. Here's a toast to Thanksgiving, and a prayer that no one tries to improve on it. The version we got is just fine, thank you. Even though the basic idea doesn't change, nor the implementation, there will be a fire in the fireplace this year, as in years past, this year the entertainment (football, movies, parades) will be in high-def, and the music will be 5.1 surround sound. Our ancestors never had it so good! There's a new version of the Beatles, but Yesterday is still a great song, and George Harrison's guitar gently weeps, for George himself, we imagine. "I said something wrong, so now I long for yesterday."
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river." In other parts of America it will be raining and cold, even snowing. I remember a Thanksgiving in Madison in a blizzard, the first of the year, a premonition of the hardness to come, but soft in the way a first snow is soft. Thanksgiving is the American passover, the dinner our seder. We eat a big meal and then go out for a walk. Hello there! Happy holiday. We give thanks for all that we have been given, for the good life we live here. America the nation of the world, pauses once a year to be thankful, before looking forward to the new year that's right around the corner. "Sun sun sun here we come." Maybe this time next year we will be at peace. Maybe all our children will be safe next year, maybe we will have learned to listen, not just to each other, not just to everyone else in the world, but to ourselves, to our hearts. Here we go! Thanksgiving 1.0, now and always. Thanks!
Werner Vogels on the Dutch election. Blogs are playing a big role in Netherlands politics. (Vogels is Amazon's CTO.) Fresh Air interviewed Ed Burns of The Wire today. They play a clip with one of the most terrifying Season 4 characters, a kid who kills people with a nail gun. The salesman in a hardware store explains the product to him, in the opening scene of the season, as it dawns on him that he's selling a murder weapon to the kid. Kevin Murphy, via email, says the nasty murdering kid is actually played by a girl! New toys arrived today from Amazon. 1. Bluetooth mouse. 2. Logitech surround-sound speakers. The new music, below, sounds really cool on the new hardware, and one less wire on the desktop is nice too.
It's got a heart-breaking rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, one of George Harrison's anthems. Anyone who says this album is bad has no fucking heart. And I hired a wiring company to install Ethernet between the den downstairs and the office upstairs. They did a professional job, at each end is a wall plate that I plug the cable into. I bought another Netgear router for the office upstairs, so now we're styling. Now I gotta hire a Berkeley-based programmer (I have someone in mind), and we're off and running. Kevin Tofel: "I've already got podcasts on the Zune and it was a simple matter to be honest." Dylan: "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters." Scoble explains the diff betw TechCrunch and Valleywag. The Wire peaked sometime in Season 3
There are no flashbacks, time marches forward relentlessly, they never go back and explain what happened, if you missed it, you missed it. That is until season 3 when it loses its edge. You can wash the dishes, flip through a B&H catalog, eat some soup, all without missing a thing. There were times when I wanted to turn the damn thing off, or just skip to the end of an episode, I was so disappointed. This doesn't seem to appear in the reviews of the show, or did it? Maybe it's just me, and I figured it out, and it no longer has the power to suprise? Now that's not to say that there aren't delicious moments in season 3, there are. But the first two seasons are the best TV I've ever seen. Mike Arrington is wrong on this one And so is Jason Calacanis. First, read this bit by Mike, who takes Nick Denton apart for daring to challenge some assumptions that Jason Calacanis has left out there, just aching to be challenged. Now Mike is wrong in so many ways, I don't think I'll be able to list them all, but I'll try. First, there's nothing wrong with what Nick did. Jason is a public figure and made a lot of public statements about netscape.com, most of which weren't examined more than superficially, and as long as Nick discloses that they are competitors, in case anyone is confused about where he's coming from, he can say whatever he wants. I thought the question he raised deserved a straight answer from Jason, without the obfuscation that came from both Mike and Jason. Did the experiment at netscape.com work? My guess is that it didn't. Why? First, for the obvious reason, people don't quit so quickly when their latest venture was a success. If it worked (and note that Jason doesn't say that it did) why quit so soon? Because there's new management at AOL? With all due respect to Jason, that doesn't make much sense to me. Denton asked the only question worth asking, and backed up the answer with numbers. If Jason has other numbers, let's see them. I want to learn what worked and what didn't because I'm always thinking up new things to do with the Internet, and it helps to know what other people's experiences were. The new Valleywag (which Mike disses, and I don't think he's right about that either) is providing that new service, where the old one just focused on who's zooming who, as if Silicon Valley was some kind of Hollywood. I lived in Silicon Valley for 20+ years, and trust me, there's not much to report on there. And Mike, isn't it good that Nick is focusing on business instead of the salacious stuff? Wouldn't it be nice to go to the bathroom at a conference and not worry about whether your sanitary habits might appear in Valleywag (true or not). Maybe Mike is protesting because the new Valleywag is getting a little close to TechCrunch? Nahh, couldn't be. Note that Nick has more or less said he's aiming Valleywag at TechCrunch. So when Mike gives Nick grief for challenging a competitor well, Mike ought to be careful about that, because he appears to be doing the same thing. And finally, I'm glad someone is digging in on these things. The more this happens, the more likely that bullshit is exposed, quickly -- the more careful people will be with slinging bullshit. And believe me, Silicon Valley has no shortage of that!
FeedYourZune is a "full featured RSS reader and Podcast Media Player." Flickr has an opinion about the most popular cameras.
Doc Searls: "As a photographer, I have a relationship with Flickr. Not with Yahoo."
Mike Arrington: "Great late-night conversation with intelligent people is a lot more interesting that the hallway chatter at the latest conference." Amen. I like Sunday Brunch conversations with intelligent people more than late-night conversations, morning person that I am. BTW, over the last month I've watched all the previous episodes of Entourage and am now in the middle of season 3 of The Wire, two fantastic and reality-altering HBO series. I find the world of inner-city Baltimore so captivating, but I'm glad to be watching it from this side of the LCD.
Another example of the relative information poverty we live in now. There's no easy way for me to get a list of all the local shopping malls and the stores within. You have to ask friends for that information. We're still living in the word of mouth era. Yeah it's a lot better than it was ten or twenty years ago, but we still have a long way to go.
Valleywag: "Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason's radical experiment." Another reason why college papers are worth reading -- they aren't owned by media companies.
Crazy Bob: 802.11n on OS X? Not yet. NY Times: "Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who regularly advises President Bush on Iraq, said today that a full military victory was no longer possible there." Where is the Bronx Science for adults? The best thing about going to Bronx Science, for me, was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age. That's what I keep looking for, as an adult. I didn't quite find it at Harvard, what I found there was permission to be creative, which is more than Silicon Valley gives, but I didn't find other people who were creating in the same way I was, or who could appreciate what I was creating, or whatever -- not sure, but the connections didn't get made. I'm watching a PBS special about Aaron Copland, and he found that kind of collegial creativity, in New York, in the early-mid 20th century. Hanging out here with Doc Searls for a couple of days last week was like what I'm looking for, but I want ten Docs, and I want to be around them 200 days a year, developing ideas across disciplines. This is what my soul yearns for, not fame, or wealth, more like fullfillment.
Maryam: "My aim is to make Ponzi blush."
Yucky peanut butter First, Yahoo's stock is doing okay, the company is growing and profitable. It's also diversified, which is another way of saying everything that the memo complains about. They have turf battles and they duplicate each others' work. In other words, Yahoo is a big company. There is no way to make them lean and focused, that's not how big companies work. Sheez, some small companies have a hard time being lean and focused. Yahoo should continue to buy their innovation from outside, because that's where innovation comes from. What Yahoo may need is someone who can speak for them, who can give an exciting speech, who can lead all the external forces, and internal ones too. What they may be missing is an eloquent founder-type who, when people need to settle a difference, can come in and make the choice. At Microsoft, in the old days when Microsoft worked, people could ask themselves What Would Bill Do? Google has Larry and Sergey. Yahoo may need a leader. But they've got a pretty good foundation to build on. And they could probably go a long, long way without great leadership, since most American companies don't have that. And come on -- bleeding in purple and yellow? Garlinghouse is a bad ripoff of Guy Kawasaki. NY Times: "Yahoo has not been nearly as good as Google at reaping profits from the huge volume of search traffic it attracts." Mike Arrington calls it a "power move." Josh Allen: "Every company wishes that they could appeal to 50 million normal people and the 57,000 who read TechCrunch. Yahoo! has succeeded at this in two important categories."
Sylvia Paull: Mr GNU meets Mr RSS. According to Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis has left AOL. Hey Jason, I call dibs on doing a project with you now that you're out of BigCoLand. Slate: "The new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history." Sitemaps becomes a defacto standard
Of course it's pragmatic for Microsoft and Yahoo to get on board behind the leader in search, Google. But there have been many times when big companies have avoided such pragmatism, so they deserve our support and gratitude. Now that the Dems control Congress
So what's the best outcome in Iraq? The Shi'ite part of Iraq will either become part of Iran or will be a client of Iran. The Sunni part will be annexed by Syria, and everyone will fight over Kurdistan. Now if I were a pessimist, I'd say that this is the place we'll fight World War III, with lots of fronts opening up all over the world, including here in the US. It was never an option for Iraq to become an American style democracy, I don't think Bush and the neocons ever really believed that could happen. If they did, I would have loved to have seen the plan for that to come about. One thing you can hear in all the Washington spin is that no one is talking about democracy anymore. The next myth to explode is that Iraq actually has government. And we should stop shipping arms into Iraq, we're just arming various sides of the civil war, and bringing about the death of more Iraqis. When you watch Baker in motion, don't think he's working for you. He's working for the Bush family, and more broadly, the Republican Party and the defense industry.
Wired interview with Gracenote co-founder and chief architect Steve Scherf. The stalk is gone?
Something else Valleywag is now doing right -- disclosing conflicts of interest. It always bothered me when they went after Jason Calacanis, whose Weblogs, Inc is a direct competitor of Gawker Media. They would never disclose that fact. In this piece they do. Note to opml.org bloggers Something is wrong on the server, not sure what it is. I'm going to have another look in an hour or two. I just took a quick look and couldn't immediately find the problem. Sorry for the outage. Postscript: Found the problem, fixed it. The server had run out of disk space, and trashed some of its data as a result. Restored the damaged file from a backup.
The Zune of Steve's eye
A striking thing about that little section of Microsoft: pictures of Steve Jobs on doors, walls, bulletin boards, each with a quote from Steve below it. The pictures were there, I was told, to motivate them, and to remind them of their goal. The usual thing for Microsoft, a taillight chase. One more thought, a question actually, does anyone know about the protocol that allows Zunes to share tunes with other Zunes? Is it open and clonable (ie, if I made a podcast device, could I use the protocol). And I suppose it's naive to ask if it's patented, but what the heck -- is it? Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times sheds some light. Ryan Tate wonders if Zune is a developer platform.
Engadget: "Our experience with the first version of the Zune software this afternoon is much like that of many version 1 software experiences. It sucks." Nick Douglas leaves Valleywag, you heard it here first. Sheila Lennon wonders what version of the web will they use on the Starship Enterprise. Beam me up! Nick Bradbury: "The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it's going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like." Google Blogoscoped: "I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts." Confabb TechCrunch on Confabb. "A new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences."
Examples: Le Web, TechCrunch party in NY, Web 2.0. Scoble's interview with Salim, recorded here in Berkeley yesterday, he explains just how awesome the product is. Technorati linkage about Confabb. The Confabb weblog. Dueling Markoffs
What a day!
Jen showed me how to use my food processor (never been used) and then went back to Santa Cruz. The remaining partiers went down the hill for Chinese. I came back up, made some delicious carrot soup, easy with the food processor, then Sylvia called and I walked up the hill to her house to hang out with Richard Stallman and Henri Poole. I had never met Stallman, and contrary to his rep on the net, he's a warm, considerate person, definitely with a very specific focus (free software) but very different from the way people portray him. A very interesting and stimulating Sunday in Berkeley!
Carl Weisbrod: "I'm an old Goldwater/Eisenhower conservative."
Speaking of Microsoft, apparently you can buy a Zune already at BestBuy. I'd buy one myself, just to know what it is, but only if it works with a Mac. I don't want to use their store, I've got my own software for managing podcasts, which is largely what I'd use it for. On the Sunday morning news shows, massive change in attitude from the Dems. But they say they won't touch money for the war. The superficial reason for this is they don't want to give fuel to future opponents saying they didn't support the troops. However, we know that most of the money goes to the defense industry, not troops; and both parties are funded by the industry. So, is this as far as change goes? Examine the examiners If a reporter wants to plant a foot in the future and burn some bridges with the past, a simple project would be to build a network model for who gets quoted by which reporters at which publications. This is fairly conspicuous in Markoff's reporting in the Times. Does he ever write an article, on any subject, that doesn't quote Danny Hillis? Maybe there was some justification for allocating him so much ink when he was a tech exec at Disney, but what has he done recently to give authority to his opinion? (And what was the value of the technology he left behind, didn't Disney buy Pixar because their technology was so far behind?) Incestuousness is a big part of the way BigPubs do business, it leads to ridiculous pieces like today's Web 3.0 piece. How did that pass through the editorial process at the Times? Seems like blatant manipulation, and the industry is so tired of this hype, it has zero chance of success (we hope). It's as obvious that Markoff considers himself a player and not a mere reporter as Judith Miller did (on admittedly a much larger scale) as we were getting ready to invade Iraq. This is the kind of reporting we won't miss, and the sooner it's documented the sooner we can move on. Postscript: The "Web 3.0" article is on the front page of today's Times. Scoble: "I've done more than 50 interviews in the past three months and collected hundreds of business cards and I've never heard anyone talking about Web 3.0."
A new podcast. I've been flashing on all kinds of things after Tuesday's election. We've never had so much power. We sure didn't get fooled again. A branch of government switched parties, and all of a sudden we got our democracy back. What's next? NY Times: "The president and his political adviser, Karl Rove, refused to compromise on legislation, bullied their own party's senators and ignored leaders of the opposition." Does hype ever go out of style? Just when you may have thought it was safe again to make software for users without so much hype, John Markoff, writing in the NY Times, says Web 3.0 is "in its infancy." Who says it's the next thing? Hmmm. Hard to figure out. Stop for a moment, take a breath. Do we really want to go here? Just as Web 2.0 is petering out (we hope) can we avoid the next bit of bullshit? The hype habit of Silicon Valley is pretty bad. How about setting expectations somewhat in line with reality? Sell what you have, not what you're dreaming about. Every time SV pumps up expectations, the money starts flowing into the hype, and away from what keeps people employed -- the technology SV is supposed to be producing. If Hollywood worked this way, they'd sell the movies they think they're going to ship in 10 years. If Nashville worked this way, they'd sell the country music of 10 years from now. If NY worked this way, they'd only sell futures, you wouldn't be able to buy stock. More hype should be as welcome by the technology industry as another Karl Rove slogan is welcomed by today's electorate (hint: the president's approval rating is down to 31, a drop of ten points in less than a week). Danny Ayers: "Who else is lumping these things together and applying that label?" Tim Finin: "The article is pretty much content free from a technology perspective." Postscript: The features they're hinting at are hardly new. Collaborative filtering is a mature technology, although there's certainly room for innovation, and a lot to be gained by opening up the silos. Example: Netflix movie recommendations. They know which movies I'm likely to like, based on the ones I rated, and by finding patterns in other people's ratings. They're remarkably good at it. Yahoo has the same feature. Amazon makes purchase recommendations, but I find they're recommending things I've already bought from them, hardly very creative, and almost never results in a sale. Anchors in OPML Anchors, as Tom Morris describes them, should survive a reorganization, and luckily it's not very hard to do. Each headline that's to be linked to externally needs some sort of identifier that's unique within the file. I suggest using the created attribute, which provides a unique ID down to the second. Of course this would fail if you create more than one node in a second, but I find that's a limit I can live with.
Liz Gannes' report on this week's other Web 2.0 Summit, the one in SF. Inquirer: "A US court is forcing the RIAA to explain why it charges people it catches pirating $750 a single rather than the 70 cents they flog them to retailers for." It's been fun watching Countdown this week. No stern lectures. Olbermann is happy! And so are we. For now. Calvin notes that the Clintons, in yesterday's picture, seem middle class, ordinary people.
BTW, the powerline adapter, in this house, never reaches wifi speeds. I tried reconfiguring the devices so they didnt try to be compatible with the standard, but that had no net effect on performance. It was worth a try, as several people suggested via email. Good morning everybody. Happy day. First day in quite some time that I don't have any appointments, no events, trips, deliveries, house guests, national elections. The weather is clear, warm, I've got lots of reading material, and food in the house. Finally, a day to putz around and not do very much, if anything.
RootsCamp in San Francisco (Nov 11-12), New York, Bloomington, Columbus and DC. A shredding truck was spotted at the VP's house. Jim Webb: "You don't have a strategy if you can't clearly articulate an endpoint." Meanwhile, as if to prove Webb's point, the Republicans are taking their leaders out back and shooting them in the head.
Coming out the lunch with Lakoff yesterday, an idea for a website of truth. Not quite a blog. Just a site that lists things that are self-evident. Not partisan truths, not truthiness, but True Truths. Such as: It's not a war, it's an occuption. So I bought another domain today. truetruths.org. NY Times editorial: "The wiretapping bill is simply outrageous, and it has no business being discussed in this lame duck session." Did the Kerry flap hurt the Demos? Seems not. Drawing Bush out hurt the Repubs, reminding the electorate, who had wised up (so it turns out), that they may have voted for the wrong guy in 2004. Big negatives for the press for not running the various verbal gaffes of the Decider-in-Chief, when he attacked Kerry. There was a chance to help US politics get out of Swift Boat mode. Yeah I do think it's their job to help our political system. Also, how about a survey of voters asking if they regret re-electing Bush? We put so much emphasis on the contrition of politicos, how about contrition for voters (who are ultimately responsible for the mess in Iraq). NY Times: "Senator George Allen of Virginia conceded today that he lost to the Democratic challenger, Jim Webb, ending the last undecided Senate contest and giving Democrats control of the full Congress for the first time in a dozen years." NY Times review of "Draft N" wireless routers.
Net effect Not much time to blog this morning, but I wanted to say that the net effect of the election is that US politics is shaken up. We've hit as significant a reset button, it seems, as 9-11 for world politics. Let's hope this time that we take better advantage of the opening. Message from voters You can fool some of the people all the time. And all of the people some of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
AP: "Democrat Jim Webb won Virginia's pivotal Senate race Wednesday, unseating Republican George Allen and giving the Democrats total control of Congress." Naked Jen: "Ding dong Rumsfeld is gone!" NY Times editorial: "The Democrats won a negative victory, riding on the wave of public anger about Republicans." AP: "Dennis Hastert announced Wednesday he will not run for leader of House Republicans." Dan Fost: Hacking the Web 2.0 Conference. Doc Searls in Berkeley, after hearing that Rumsfeld is going. He's one happy dude! Robert Gates will be the new Secretary of Defense. Burns & Allen are the losers in Montana & Virginia. Dave Griffin: "The Rhode Island vote now means there will be a Whitehouse in the Senate." UPI: "It was a thumpin', Bush said Wednesday." I've reserved thumpin.org, thumpin.net and thumpin.us. thumpin.com, already taken, is a porn site. Click here to see related blogs. XML.com makes a couple of mistakes here, criticizing software made by my company for a flaw it didn't have. I wish they'd check their facts. And this grudge they have about me is so old, so tired, so irrelevant. GIve it up, okay? Scott Rosenberg, Berkeleyite, observes new Republican spin. "Former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert." I love the way that sounds. We've now gotten rid of Tom DeLay and Hastert. Whoopee. Doc's here, we're watching CNN before going out to breakfast. We're playing a neat game called Spot the Republican. When we see a Republican on CNN, I decide what form of punishment we're going to give them. Usually it's the death penalty of some form. Hanging, firing squad, dismemberment, lethal injection, burning at the stake, disembowelment. TheoDP: Amazon Patent Reform Timeline. jkOnTheRun: Now NTP wants a piece of Palm. NY Times: "Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives and defeated at least four Republican senators yesterday, riding a wave of voter discontent with President Bush and the war in Iraq." Washington Post: "The political pendulum in American politics swung away from the right yesterday, putting an end to the 12-year Republican Revolution on Capitol Hill and delivering a sharp rebuke of President Bush and the Iraq war."
Notes on tonight's election returns
7:06:50 PM: We're in a lull, the mood has really changed among the talking heads. Republicans are saying they lost their way. The Democrats are either jubiliant (in speeches) and sober (interviews). The dynamic of American politics is changing visibly, minute by minute. 6:33:26 PM: MSNBC calls Rhode Island for the Democrats. There goes Li | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I just joined 
In the late 90s, the period of irrational exuberance, we knew the end would come, and we knew what the end would look like -- a stock market crash of the dotcom sector. So, if Web 2.0 is a bubble, and if like all bubbles it bursts, how will we know when it happens?
When I realized this, I should have known, because I've been 
Two weeks ago they had two fantastic segments, one about Lou Dobbs, the iconoclast preacher of closed borders, the imitation-journalist of CNN, and the other about the English-language version of the Arab news network Al Jazeera, and get this, one of their anchors, Dave Marish, a semi-famous US journalist, is Jewish! They interviewed Marish, and he speaks right to me about the need for understanding, and I think it's amazing that the Arabs have hired a Jew to speak English for them. 
The secret to a juicy turkey: Cook it upside down. The breasts are the part you have to keep moist, and if you cook the 
Thanksgiving in Berkeley is a fine holiday. Our free-range 
Postscript: I think the world of Mike and Jason. They're both great guys. Alan Kay once said the Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. Jean-Louis Gassee said that as the monkey climbs the tree, the more people can see his derriere. Mike is at the top of the tree these days, what he says matters. And I say competition is good, it keeps you on your toes, and no one loves you as much as your competitor. And I also say it's good to take a break once in a while, to get your thoughts in order. I love talking with both of these guys, they're smart, they're curious, and they learn. Both of them would be more than welcome at the Bronx Science for Adults. And I don't know Nick as well, but I suspect he would be too. 
A question you can't easily ask the Internet today. "Where can I buy firewood as a function of price and distance from where I am now?" I invested in 
Too bad they don't still make the 
I've been pretty busy the last couple of days, so I've had to wait to offer my support and congratulations to 
I think having a Democratic Congress is cool, but it just pops off one level of lunacy. They're still talking about Iraq like it's a borough of NYC, both parties. I think I see what's going to happen now -- gradually Iran is taking over, waiting until they can announce that they have nukes. Eventually we'll have to decide whether we want to fight a war with Iran or come home, defeated. The purpose of the Baker group is to spin it so that it's not W's fault, maybe even pin it on the Dems. We're headed for some bad times, no way out of it, and I think they all know it, and they're jockeying not to let the blame land on them. 
I met with the people doing the Zune at Microsoft in the summer of 2004, when podcasting was gaining traction (in Seattle no less), but wasn't showing on their radar yet. I explained how they could make their device a perfect podcast client. I couldn't tell what they were thinking of course, but it seemed they weren't convinced podcasting was real. Too bad, they could have made a simple product, not had to do any deals with Hollywood, and do an end-run around Apple, which still hasn't made the corner turn to DRM-less media (which is one of the most profound things about podcasting, and no accident, I assure you).
Imagine John Markoff on the banjo, playing with 
Have you noticed that there's a formula out there, for Flickr-like sites, that, instead of providing social networking around pictures, try to do it for podcasts or videos. Examples include 
Andrew Baron of Rocketboom 
Quick report on my personal Web 2.0 Summit held this week in Berkeley. I had a fair number of interesting meetings, resulting in a likely Monday announcement. Another investment for Dave Ventures, USA. A micro-funding event, in line with the current fashion, where small bucks, brilliant thinking and hungry hard-working developers can (fingers crossed, praise Murphy) yield out of this world returns. No more hints, but come back on Monday around lunchtime for a new roadmap. 
