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Weak wifi Sorry for the lack of posts, the wifi here is pretty weak, I get a connection then lose it. Good morning! Arrived at the Reboot venue. Movie of empty auditorium at start of day.
Jet Lag News Hey that would be a good name for a blog! Anyway, here's what's new in the world of Jet Lag. Couldn't get to sleep until 1AM (maybe even a bit later). Sun was up by 4AM (maybe earlier). Only three hours sleep last night. Exclusive: That's not enough sleep for Comrade Davey! Google Gears I read that Google is going to announce a toolkit today that lets you run web apps on a disconnected machine. Something we had working in Radio in 2001. The key is something called a desktop web server. Nothing revolutionary about it. A database and CMS that runs on the local machine. I suspect that their approach will be heavier on the database and lighter on the CMS, since they like Ajax apps (as do many others, of course), where the content rendering happens in the browser, in Javascript. Reboot 2007 Pics from the opening party at Reboot 2007. Congrats to Jason?
Glad to hear someone is innovating in search. I bet it's cool. Not sure I like that the insiders will see it before I will. :-( PS: The site is live now. I signed up, logged in and started looking around. There's a page on me (of course that's the first thing I looked for), and what little it contains is accurate. I like that they identify the person who edited the page (someone named ck). PPS: Looks like Yahoo? From Rex Hammock, on vacation with family "I'm vacationing and am offline but had to share the following snippet of a converation I just had with my son, the high school sophomore. "'I've got a friend you should meet -- He speaks your language,' he said. "'What do you mean, he speaks my language?' I responded. "There was a pause and then he said, 'You know -- he's the kind of guy who knows who Dave Winer is.' "That was high praise from the 16 year old." Here's one for Naked Jen A billboard in a Swedish ferry terminal in Halsingbord.
Still the best picture I've taken Proof that every picture tells a story.
Easy upgrade to Facebook When someone lists you as a "friend" on Facebook you get to confirm it. That's good. When you click on the "Confirm" button, you get a list of choices that almost never seems to have the right choice. Does that mean you don't have a relationship with the person? No. It means that the list of possible choices hasn't been updated since Facebook was opened to people outside the education system. For example, Jeff Jarvis requested that I confirm that he is a friend. Of course I'm going to confirm that, because there is a relationship between Jeff and myself that should be part of my social network. In this case, Jeff is part of my blogging network, and I am part of his. We point to each other frequently. When we run into each other at a conference we have friendly words for each other. If you want me to introduce you to Jeff, I can probably do it, and vice versa. Also, Jeff has introduced me to a company I subsequently invested in (not something students usually do). Jeremy Allaire is also in my queue, and is verified immediately. What's the relationship? We were both early relatively successful web developers. We once, jointly, floated an interesting proposal for a tech standard that didn't go anywhere. I'm a founder of and pundit in a field that Allaire has started a company in (and raised a prodigious amount of money). He probably reads my blog. And there's the "delighted by" checkbox for women I'll never date (too young, live too far away, etc), but who nonetheless flatter me by requesting friendship. Another checkbox -- "fantasizes about." PS: For extra credit, relationship-defining should be part of Facebook's open architecture. Memorial Day postscript In Monday's NY Times, I read a rousing op-ed piece by Paul Krugman, who quoted President Bush saying that Americans never go to war unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. Krugman said that no American president has ever had less right to say that. Gives you goosebumps, until you realize it may not be true. When I was writing my Memorial Day piece, I said that the war in Iraq is an insult to all other wars. I gave World War II as an example, but that is one of the few wars that the US has fought, except for the Revolution and World War I that you can say that about. If you stop and think about it, the US goes to war all the time for no good reason. For example, who but the US could you blame for the Civil War? That counts as a war, doesn't it? Lots of people died. It devastated huge parts of the country. You think 9-11 was bad, think again. The Civil War was much much worse. The clever part of the hype about 9-11 is that it disclaims that the attack came from outside the US. Well, that's a distinction without a difference. If the terror comes from within is it any less terrible? Krugman was right about many other things, but I think that those who hold the US up as a shining beacon of morals in war-going have been watching too many John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart movies. Maybe we should aspire to that. A Berkeley prof with his hand out An over-covered story -- the professional reporters will go away, which is bad news for you and me. Not saying it isn't true, but how many times, and different ways have you read this story. But if Google were to fund the reporters, as the author suggests, what happens when Google's fortunes decline? Tech is a cyclic industry. What goes up must come down. Count on it. And who will watch Google? That's been the problem with the employees of big media companies, they never look at their funders. How do we know they're really losing money? Maybe they're controlled by politicians or business people who want to do nasty stuff without being observed? I could make the same argument, persuasively, for basic computer research. Who's doing it? Who's funding it? But the money dried up there without many articles in the SF Chron decrying it. Big surprise? Nope, of course not. The reporters are selfish and narcisistic. Hey, if you want our attention, stop complaining, stop the open offers to sell out, and let's get working on solving the problem. I want professional reporting to continue, but I also want to live forever, and that ain't happening. Arrived in Copenhagen At 2:17PM Central European Time, Tuesday. Left Berkeley at 11:25AM Pacific, Monday. Thomas just showed up, all is good, seeya after a bit. Flickr: Having lunch at a coffee house in Copenhagen. Paolo is coming to Copenhagen tomorrow. Who else? From Jim Posner things to do in Copenhagen. I want to take a train trip up the coast tomorrow. Some kind of record I haven't slept since 5AM Pacific Monday. It's now 6PM Central European. Which is 9AM Pacific Tuesday. So it's 28 hours since I slept. Tired, but I took a shower, so I'm not sleepy. Makes sense to stay up as long as I can. Took a melatonin though. Should be nodding off soon. Jetlag I got 0 hours sleep on the plane, so now I've been up for 26 hours straight. I just asked Thomas if David Weinberger has ever been to Reboot. He says yes. I say then I feel like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I'm going to try to stay up for two more hours and then go back to the hotel and crash. Can't recall beeing this jetlagged. Economist: Viagra and jet lag. Internet perf in my hotel room
Nothing Accomplished! Relatively speaking I have very little to be angry about about the war in Iraq. Except for the information that comes to me in the news, and that's very abstract, hard to feel unless I really try, the war has no direct impact on my life. I don't know anyone who is serving in Iraq. I don't know anyone with relatives in Iraq. My taxes haven't gone up to pay for the war. There is no rationing, no shortages. I don't drive much so the increased price of gas isn't having much impact. But the war does make me angry. To call it a war is an insult to all other wars. World War II really was a war against an Axis of Evil. It was unavoidable. A war for our existence. A fight for freedom. Watching 60 Minutes tonight, on Memorial Day, it's hard to imagine how we go on living our lives as other Americans give up so much, for something so utterly pointless. As the program ended, it became clear that our soldiers are having the same discussions about the war that we're having here. They know about the lack of support for the war in America. They process it in different ways. Listening to the soldiers, I can tell they were lied to as we were lied to, and of course because they have so much at stake, it must be so hard to consider that the lies were actually lies. This week, for the first time, the President is floating the idea that a massive pullout is coming soon. Oh what an effect that must have on our soldiers in Iraq. The futility in risking so much knowing that the outcome, instead of Mission Accomplished will be Nothing Accomplished. Other than the unnecessary sacrifice of a nation, ours, and its army. Robert Byrd: "Today I weep for my country." Shopping
Ridiculous? I wanted to buy a new jacket. Something roomy and warm, because it might get chilly in Copenhagen at night. I wanted pockets, and I want it to look good, but not so flashy (i.e. memorable) that I can't get away with wearing it every night on this trip. It's the only jacket I'm bringing. (I want to travel light this time, a small suitcase on wheels and a knapsack.) I walked into The Gap on Bay Street, and started looking through the racks, and was approached by a salesperson who didn't speak English. She pulled me over to the Clearance rack and pulled out a small jacket (I wear XXL) and handed it to me and walked away. I put it back on the rack, but there wasn't enough room for it, so I really had to work. She came back, mumbled something in Chinese English (whatever language that is) and pulled the jacket off the rack again and tried to hand it to me. I wouldn't take it, and I turned to go back to the rack I was looking at. She came over and started talking to me again in jibberish. I turned around and walked out, confident that I wasn't missing anything. I looked in the window at Banana Republic across the street and saw two clerks talking to each other, and no customers. After the Gap experience, I didn't dare walk into their zone. All this happened after I walked into the Apple Store on the same street. It was the sublime experience. I zipped from station to station, looking at merchandise, drooling over things I don't need, seriously considering buying an iMac because I saw a man walking out with one with such joy on his face. I want some of that. I had two ideas, to buy a third battery so I could use the computer all the way to Europe even though there was no power at the seat on the KLM 747. I bought one for $69. And for $39 I bought their World Travel Adapter Kit. A sales kid, respectful and competent (and he spoke fluent English, the language of our country) got me exactly what I asked for, so quickly I didn't have time to consider another impulse purchase. But while I was waiting, another competent English speaking sales guy asked if I was being helped. All this while the store was packed with customers. I noted that there were people with dogs in the store, they seemed to fit right in. I asked, when the sales guy came back, if dogs were really allowed in the store and he said yes. Apple really gets retail, they understand their product and their customer, and the experience is just fantastic. And every time I visit they get at least $100 from me. Sometimes much more. I continued down Bay St, still looking for the jacket. I stopped in a much bigger Banana Republic on the corner, asked where the men's dept was, they said it was in the other store. I turned around walked across the street to Old Navy, where a person at the front door tried to hand me a brochure for something. I said I didn't want it, but I did want a jacket. She pointed toward the back of the store where they had a few ugly hoodies, nothing like what I wanted, so I continued down the street to Barnes & Noble to get a book about Italy, which I found in short order. No sales people got in the way, I also picked up a copy of Al Gore's new book, went upstairs, made the purchase with my membership card, got my parking ticket validated, and got out quickly with what I came for and one optional purchase, got in the car, no jacket (which was the primary goal for the stop at Bay St). Went grocery shopping, a predictable, quick and pleasant experience, went to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, the service there is excellent, but not quite sublime. Smart young people behind the counter, they treat everyone well, out the door quickly after paying a huge amount of money (drugs are so expensive) and went across the street to have a burger with a friend, who recommended going to REI for the jacket. After the burger we got in the car, they had exactly what I was looking for, I bought a jacket for $50, then looked around a bit and bought a much nicer one that will also work for $179. My friend bought one of the $50 jackets (an impulse buy) and a REI baseball cap (also on impulse). All in all, I spent well over $1000. The stores that had their act together got all the money. The stores that didn't even come close to meeting my needs (about half of them) got nothing. Links only a nerd could love Les Orchard says each API is a snowflake that every developer has to build custom interfaces for. Someday all these guys will realize they need to get together and come up with some standards for serializing data to simplify the work for themselves and developers. A lot of compromise and working together will be needed to make this happen. And when they have finished, many years from now, they will be where we were with XML-RPC in 1998. :-( Brent Simmons writes a tutorial that I can use. It's really nice to see Brent caring about Frontier! After sorting out the mess on Friday, I have a new sense of what's possible with Frontier. Not saying that has anything to do with Brent's piece, but there may be some kind of wave of karma flowing around Frontier that wasn't flowing before. Or it could just be my imagination.
On mediation Observation: "At least it's over." And yes, I learned a lot. Creativity is coming back in new ways. I, and UserLand, were under a cloud from 1992 until 2007. It's amazing how much we got done, considering. The cloud is now gone. This morning, I felt like the stack has been popped back to much brighter days. We'll see if this holds up. My small Web 2.0 dividend now appears reasonably safe. Another way of looking at it is that I got back a good chunk of the cash I put into Web 2.0. Yesterday's post was entitled "community" for a very good reason. As I went into the mediation, I remembered how genuinely happy people seemed to be when the deal with VeriSign came out. I couldn't understand why, usually people seemed to resent my success. And weblogs.com seemed a particular lightning rod for grief. Now, a couple of years later it's more clear. I had a much bigger reservoir of goodwill than I was aware of. Another bit of information. While the threat of a defamation suit was hanging over me, I heard from a number of bloggers who had been similarly threatened, and caved. This was understandable, but disheartening. I felt in yesterday's negotiation that I was not just looking out for my own interests, but also trying to create a precedent for bloggers in the future. You may not have to cave under a threat of a lawsuit, although I understand that there are good reasons people do it. However, before making a decision, look in your homeowner's insurance policy, if you have one. Many of them cover defamation judgments, believe it or not. Most of the terms of the settlement are confidential, but otherwise I did not agree to limit what I say publicly, or remove or modify any posts. In some ways I knew Russo pretty well, and I was pretty sure he wasn't misleading me in the past about his respect for the First Amendment, and as it turns out, that belief was correct. Do I feel like a winner? More so this afternoon than I did last night. I'm optimistic that when I get on the plane on Monday for Copenhagen, I'll leave more than California behind. Afternoon humor
Steve sez Geez, apparently I've pissed off Steve Jobs, again.
Midnight update It was a marathon mediation, starting at 10AM, finishing at 9PM, but we reached a settlement, drafted an agreement, and signed it. Most of the terms are confidential, but the important point is that we executed mutual releases, so there won't be any lawsuits. I'll probably post more about it over the weekend. Good night y'all. Great community Illuminating and informative comments in the last two days. I'm spending the day in mediation of the Russo & Hale matter, so expect little or no blog posting. If you feel so inclined, say a little prayer for peace in our time, I'm hoping to come out of today with the whole mess behind us. I've learned a lot about mediation in the last few weeks, esp talking with some people in Berkeley who do it for a living, and have come to think in terms of mediating conflict. Can we find middle ground, where we both achieve our goals? That's what mediating is about, finding what's in between. It's a funny concept for me, since I've spent my whole professional career doing things to dis-inter-mediate, so maybe it's possible to go too far, and decentralize so much that in order to solve a problem you need to come together? I expect to learn a lot today. To give some and get some, I hope. Namaste y'all! Jim Goodman: "A compromise is both parties going away unhappy." What to make of the Facebook APIs? I have a Facebook page, but I don't use it much. I like the wild wild web, the unbounded frontier. To me, getting to include something in a web page is ho-hum, been-there, etc etc. A long time ago. Like Amyloo, I wonder if they got it backwards?
Say it ain't so AppleInsider "believes in all sincerity that the Mac mini is dead." I, for one, would be disappointed if this were true.
Flickr: Mac Mini in my geeked-out home network. Europe travel questions 1. Will my Cingular Blackberry work in Europe? 2. Will my Sprint EVDO? 3. Will there be Internet on the KLM flight from SFO to Amsterdam? 4. Will there be power at the seat? 5. Which power adapters do I need to bring? Todd Mitchell offers some very detailed answers. Brian Benz has a novice geek's guide for staying connected while overseas. I got Cingular to turn on the international roaming service. Calls and email will be expensive, but what the heck, I'm only there for 11 days. KLM says no there's no Internet on the 747 and no electric outlets either. It's an old plane, but it's huge. I got them to put me upstairs, in a window seat. Let's hope I don't have to go to the bathroom too much. The consensus is that I can leave the EVDO card home, it won't work in Europe at all. Luckily wifi does work in Europe, and it should be better than the last time I was overseas. Two eye-openers in the NY Times
One of the pieces that caught my attention was by Nicholas Kristof, an essay about trade with China. He explained that while the balance of trade between the United States and China is lopsided in favor of China, there are countries with which China has a trade deficit. For example, China is in the business of assembling parts created elsewhere, and those parts show up as a negative on their balance sheet. So while a Barbie doll they send to US creates a $3 debt from the US to China, only $0.03 of that belongs to China, the rest of it is owed by them to other countries. Our massive trade deficit with China actually distorts the economic strength of China. They're not so strong. The second piece, about nursing homes in the US, was written by Atul Gawande. He explains that while nursing homes are good at keeping people alive, and better than they used to be, for people who lead rich lives before requiring care, they can be like prison. For people my age, this reality isn't so far away that it wouldn't be a good time to start thinking about it, and learning, and maybe helping to reform the system. Season finales Two TV serials I follow wound up their seasons this week. I have to watch the last episode of Heroes again to figure out the details, but it left me satisfied. A good story, with a good moral. Check. The finale of Lost left me wondering why they're going to have another season. So much was resolved. It also had a strong moral message, be satisfied with what you have. TV is definitely getting better. Advisory board finale
Here's what I thought in May 2004: "This group is not a standards organization. It does not own RSS, or the spec, it has no more or less authority than any other group of people who wish to promote RSS." Today I think it's even less than that. It basically stopped functioning later in 2004. The people involved went on to do other things. In the meantime RSS kept growing and growing. Did RSS actually need an "advisory board?" No, it didn't. I think it's great that people care about RSS. Keep supporting it, and if you want to help people use it, great. Just don't pretend there's any official board or body or whatever behind it, because there isn't. Oh and by the way this is where the RSS 2.0 spec is and always will be. (Modulo redirects and Acts of Murphy.) Postscript: Any group could create a profile of RSS, and recommend that other people use it. That group could be the authority on the profile, and change it in response to feedback. A validator could have an option to test against conformity to the profile, to say that a file is not only compatible with the RSS spec, but it also conforms to the profile. The group could act according to rules they devise, which they could pattern after the IEEE, IETF or W3C, or come up with a completely new protocol. Doing a profile is a logical and fair way for people who want to do standards work based on RSS to proceed. Yo Ted! Kind words from Ted Leonsis about Web 3.0. Request for linkage
Today's talk Audio of interview with Stephen Evans of BBC World Service. Today's quick hits Jose Marinez: Poor Man's SMS Gateway. Rex Hammock: Web 3.0 delayed until fourth quarter. Peter Rojas asks if there's interest in an unconference to discuss the podcast player. I would certainly participate and help organize the event. Podcasting won't be fully ready for prime time until there's a player designed specifically for podcasting.
Todd Cochrane says Google buying Feedburner is "pure evil." What do you think of Fleck? Movie of the beautiful beach, pool and patio at the hotel. Congrats to the Knight Award winners, many of whom are readers of this weblog. Congrats to Feedburner, whose $100 million payday was confirmed by Mike Arrington. Let's keep an eye on Google hoping they are kind to the ecology of the RSS coral reef. What is Web 3.0? My talk went well, and I did talk briefly about how we should think about Web 3.0. I know other people have said it's the Semantic Web, and maybe that use of the name will stick. I'm with Tim Berners-Lee who says Web 2.0 is really what the web itself is about. He always intended it to be a two-way medium. First, I think of Web 2.0 as the Two-Way Web, the Read-Write Web, the Web of User-Generated Content. It's Flickr and blogs and wikis. It's everybody creating the medium for everyone else. Imho, the next step after that, I hope, is the professional media fully embracing the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. See amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary.
I totally disagree with my friend Robert Scoble who says that newspapers are dead. There's always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we'll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died. They need to change, and imho, when that change happens, we will safely be in the era of Web 3.0. If you have questions about this vision, please post a comment here. Good morning everybody
We're hearing Cynthia Figge interview Janine Benyus about biomimickry. I'm interviewed later this morning on ideas for the future in blogging, podcasting, etc. Last night at dinner I talked with Stewart Brand about future-safing archives, so my schpiel about that is well-rehearsed. I'll certainly talk about that this morning. Here are some of the questions they asked me to address. What's on the horizon -- still OPML, podcast player (wifi, open to other apps, recording), real unconferences. Service I'd like to buy that isn't available right now -- future-safe web sites, relate this to conversation with Charlie Nesson. What is Web 3.0? Easy to answer. Stay tuned. Excellent wifi at Hotel del Coronado
Silicon Valley Sitcoms When the VCs gave $25 million to Adam Curry and Ron Bloom to create a record label and ad agency for podasting talent, and John Markoff wrote in the NY Times that Evan Williams was going to create the eBay of podcasting, I had an instant deja vu moment. I've been here before, it seemed. The last time I had this realization was at a Christmas party in San Francisco at the tail end of the dotcom boom, with people from competing pre-IPO pet food companies, each boasting how rich they would be after their companies went public.
Instead if they hired the math genius from Numb3rs, he might tell them what's obvious. They eat their seeds, and don't invest in creating new ones. In the last bust, I had a blog, and documented it here, it's all in the archives. But I've been through a few busts before I had a blog, and as Mike Arrington says in today's TechCrunch, it's time for another house-cleaning in Silicon Valley, because the place is clogged with hangers-on, and you can't find the new ideas among all the pet food companies and me-too social networks.
When I moved back to sunny California, I decided to give Berkeley a try. I have a nice guest bedroom, and Mike you can stay at my house any time. PS: I think it's cool that Mike wrote his piece. I think it's because I write stuff like this that the VCs and BigCo execs tune me out. I can't imagine what they will say to him. Should get an interesting discussion going. A reminder from Les Orchard We need to keep beating the drum for OPML reading lists. Hotel del Coronado Movie: I arrived at my hotel, to a lovely room, so I made a movie to show it off, and the surroundings, and a cameo appearance (near the end) by one of the pioneers of the Mac software world (not me). Hint: His company was called Farallon. Remember them? San Diego-bound I'm going to the Future In Review conference, where I will speak, in the future (tomorrow) about the future, in review. With Loren Feldman in Little Italy Live video with Loren Feldman and some tiramisu, canoli, Steve Gillmor and a beautiful Italian waitress. Copenhagen or Amsterdam? Interestingly, next week Mike will be in Amsterdam at a tech conf at the same time I'm in Copenhagen at a tech conf. It seems that Copenhagen is to Amsterdam as Berkeley is to Palo Alto. Funny how things work out like that. (My flight goes through Amsterdam. And I'm headed south after the conference, destination Milano.) Zune, part two, day two
So despite my best efforts and dozens of hours invested, I still haven't managed to get one song or podcast onto my Zune. In the meantime, of course the iPod is still serving my audio listening needs, with no extra effort. There's no hope of it working with the the other laptop, since it requires XP Service Pack 2, and it has Windows 2000 installed. I suppose I could buy a new copy of Windows XP for the laptop with the broken keyboard, but that seems ridiculous. I've paid for a copy of the OS for that machine, and I also have a working copy of XP running in Parallels on my Mac. And it would just be yet another experiment, because after all this michegas (including lugging a couple of heavy laptops through the NYC subway, JFK, SFO, and BART) there's no reason to suspect that more effort would result in success. Postscript 1: I took a movie of the machine rebooting, and froze playback on the error screen. It's hard to read, but maybe you've seen it before and have an idea how to fix it? Postscript 2: Jarod says Knoppix and a USB drive are a good way to get data off a dead PC.
Advice for campaigns At the end of the last session on Friday they asked the people in the audience to raise their hands with ideas for the campaigns. I had my hand up, but they didn't call on me. Had they, this is what I would have suggested. Take the money you raise and instead of spending it all on advertising, spend some of it on stuff that helps people now. Spend 1/4 of the money on political advertising. The usual stuff, attack ads, issue ads, whatever. It's all a waste, but you have to waste some money to persuade the press your campaign is serious. Try to run your ads in media the press follows. Spend 1/2 of the money on a social program that people care about. Buy health insurance for 50,000 poor people in Mississipi. Install free wifi in one American city for a few years. In 2004, I recommended to Dean that he set up permanent blogging infrastructure because at the time setting up a blog was too hard and unreliable. Now that's no longer a problem.
Next attempt at Zune
BTW, on the flight back from NY I saw someone using a Zune. Made me think that if I had mine working we could have shared some music over wifi (even though I guess it violates the airline rules). Checklist I started my checklist for my 11-day Europe trip which starts a week from today. Purchased my Eurail Pass. I have five days starting in Copenhagen and ending in Milano. They ship it from Newton Center, which is pretty close to where I used to live when I was in Massachusetts. Thanks for PDF I had a wonderful time at the PDF, even though I spent a fair amount of time writing and surfing instead of participating. I really like both of the guys who ran the conference, Andrew and Micah. And everyone was so warm and friendly, much more so than at conferences held in California. How unusual for a NYC event! Late start First post today at 3:25PM. Yikes!
Police intimidation of free speech in NJ? On the plane today, one the of the flight attendants told me about a scandal rocking New Jersey, where the state troopers union, unhappy with questions raised about its practices by a radio talk show host, publicized his home address and phone number, and tried to intimidate the show's sponsors and the radio station's executives. I said I'd ask about it on my blog, and I am hereby doing so. Here's a Goggle News search query that returns lots of relevant hits. Is this for real? Is this the United States of Fascism now? Are we allowed to ask questions about civil servants, without fear of reprisal? Ebb & Flow SF Chron: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom. 3/24/07: "Embrace the best bloggers." Back in Beserkeley See you at the Cybersalon tonight.
Today's links Kevin Tofel: "Widsets have extended my phone by magnitudes; granted, I use a Windows Mobile smartphone, but these widgets are Java based, so many phones can run them." Winksite
One of the people in the audience is monopolizing the discussion, saying over and over how she doesn't get it. That's the problem with a vendor doing a product presentation. He's got to be nice because it's a customer. The room empties out. I'm staying here because I'm getting caught up on email. Postscript: I asked Hudson what he thought of Twitter. A long discussion ensued. I suggested that he provide a user interface, both mobile and desktop, for posting to Twitter, in addition to allowing for the display of Twitter-created RSS feeds. I thought Winksite could be the perfect first-peer in Twitter's coral reef. Let's see what happens. Unconference art Neither of the conferences I went to today are really unconferences, people are doing presentations, I'm in the audience, expected to either ask questions or make suggestions. People don't seem ready yet to accept that knowledge is distributed through the room, we're here to be taught. 3/5/06: What is an unconference? Afternoon at MobileCamp I spent the morning at the PDF Unconference, so I'm spending some time this afternoon at MobileCamp. I'm in Room 3, watching a presentation about how to build your own SMS gateway. Not sure I need to do it, but the other sessions are either over-full, or I don't understand what they're about. Cocoa UltraSMS is a "free utility for extracting SMS messages from a mobile phone into a MySQL database for use within your own applications and websites." The teacher, Jose Marinez, says he'll put the full instructions for setting up the SMS gateway on his blog. He has the gateway running on his Mac Mini at home. Maybe I'll set one up too, but I couldn't follow the demo he did here today. Remixing politics by JD Lasica
He's describing a project to allow people to share speeches and interviews, commercials. Problems with Youtube, per JD: 1. Uploads are limited to 10 minutes. 2. No Creative Commons. 3. Can't download the video. Outthink Media is doing the development. Blip.tv is a partner. Ourmedia is the central place people will go to. Coral reefs, the saga continues Bravetrail asks how many coral reefs do fish need? The answer is of course that we only need one coral reef. But a federated server that ties into Twitter would not be a new coral reef, it would be part of the Twitter coral reef.
The danger is that Google is a super-power, and coral reefs depend on harmony and no one entity being too powerful. Such an entity might disrupt the fragile ecology of the whole reef. Of course they'll say they won't, but... Well I've gotten too far ahead of reality. There is no announced deal, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. This is the main reason I've been uncomfortable with a company (Feedburner) trying to make a business out of the centralizing something that only works if its decentralized. And I'd feel much more comfortable if a publishing company bought them, than a technology company. Publishing companies tend to accept technology as-is, technology companies, often try to play a game of lock the user in the trunk.
Next stops Sunday back to Calif, early morning flight. Ride BART from SFO to North Berkeley. Sunday evening, Cybersalon, a reprise of the "debate" here this afternoon. Tuesday afternoon, San Diego for the Future In Review conference. On-stage interview with BBC Radio Wednesday. Friday, mediation with Russo & Hale. Monday, fly to Copenhagen for REBOOT 9 on Thursday. Days inbetween to discover Denmark, acclimate to time-zone, midnight sun. June 1-7, train riding around Europe. Destinations unknown! June 7, return to US of A through Milano. Pretty good wifi at conference
Bloggers debate Andrew Keen opens a panel at Personal Democracy Forum debating The Cult of the Amateur. Links of the Day Aaron Pressman on MSM that fell for hoaxes. BBC on Flickr censorship. Twittervision in 3-D. Wandered into a press conference
Craig Newmark is sitting at the table, saying Being There type quotable things, of course he is much more self-aware than he lets on. Eli Pariser from Moveon.org is sitting to my right. Will something come of this? Well, there are a lot of industries that want to see the US networks for computers and cell phones to stay in the 20th Century. The cable and entertainment industries are scared of access being a free or relatively free thing. Stifling while listening to Friedman I did a good job of stifling while listening to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, although at times I did gasp out loud at his arrogance and disregard for us, the audience. As you know I don't like the audiences, but today I am definitely in one. I'm not allowed to talk, respond, agree or disagree. My job is to listen and that's it. Friedman told an old story about how the Internet out of control would turn everyone into a public figure, like Friedman, who suffers from slander and exposure. True, the press can be unkind, Friedman himself has given credit for my work to a mob. What recourse did I have? Not much. I was thinking of responding to him in a question after his speech, but luckily I didn't have the chance. Talking from the audience is to talk with no power. I'll wait until I have the stage, later today, or here on my blog, when I can finish a thought without having to explain my qualifications.
I've been able to use my ability to out bad businesses to get equitable treatment for myself and others. Sure some people will use this medium for bad purposes, as Friedman uses the Times for what I think are bad purposes. Him painting our medium as inherently evil might have slowed things down a tiny bit, a few years ago, but today it only tells us how flat this world looks to a man in Friedman's place. It's no more flat than any other world, but if you over-simplify it can look that way. Report from the PDF
People are dressed much better here than the typical California conference. Lots more women. ALready schmoozed with lots of people who it was good to see. Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Craig Newmark, Salim Ismail. I have Alzheimer's, I know this because I've been confused by three people who knew me who I didn't recognize. Two of them were very attractive young women. I'm losing my mind. Sitting next to Ed Cone. I explained that he was lucky that I actually recognized him. I've already sung his praises, as the godfather of Greensboro blogging, a legendary small North Carolina city that probably has the highest per capita blogging population than any other comparable city in the US. Ed Cone: "Guy in tie at podium w/slides == death." Please, no more presentations! How about a discussion. This conference desperately needs to adopt the philosophy of the medium that it covers. If you're reading this in the room and agree, please cover your mouth and cough three times. It's not the blogosphere
Somehow a fraudulent email was distributed to Apple employees. One of them forwarded the email to Engadget. They made a reasonable attempt to verify the email, failing to get a comment from Apple PR, they believed it was authentic, so they ran it. What's new is the quick turnaround, otherwise Engadget is a professional publication that happens to use the web and tools of the blogging world, but this is not the blogosphere. Nothing wrong with that, and I don't think Engadget did anything wrong. Are they a powerful publication now? Yes. The news, while it was believed to be true, made Apple's stock go down; when retracted, the stock went back up. They acted as any professional news organization would, which is what they are.
Miscellanios BBC: "Anya Peters went from homeless blogger to published author in the blink of an eye." My Sprint EVDO card works grrrreat in this hotel. Josh Marshall: "This White House has mainly used 'classification' as a way to keep embarrassing information out of public view." Checked in at the Hilton, across the street from Ground Zero. We've all been here at one time or another. Well, at least I have. Ron Paul the hero of 2008? Of course the Republicans are trying to tar and feather Rep Ron Paul, spin what he says to make it sound like he's a nut. Even the Democrats aren't making as much sense as he is.
I'd like to shake Ron Paul's hand someday. I might even work for the guy, how about that! I honestly don't give a damn if the Republicans win or the Democrats -- I'd just like to see us, as a country, start using our brains, and start caring about not just ourselves but the poor schnooks who are dying. A little Golden Rule would help us feel okay about all the blessings we have. As Maude used to say, and I think this every time I hear one of these guys like Blitzer or McCain (they're all the same) lie on TV -- God'll get you for that Walter. Well God won't only be getting Wolfe and John, he'll be getting you and me, if we stand around and don't do anything and let the bullshit continue. Point of view is everything Les Orchard: "Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you've amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it's good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people." That's exactly right. And he goes on to explain that's why when reviewers look at Twitter, or other networking systems (like blogs) they see them as mundane. But it's like listening to random phone conversations, you'd think the same thing. But suppose you were listening to a conversation among people you know? Twitter isn't private, so it's not exactly like eavesdropping, but it is personal. These days on the Internet we're experimenting with various mixtures of private and public, subscriptions and ephemeral connections. Almost no one watches the main Twitter page, yet that's probably where most of the reviewers go. The naive reviewer hasn't got much to offer these days. Wolf Blitzer interviews Ron Paul It's amazing how Blitzer protects his viewers from the new information that there might be understandable reasons why the US was attacked on 9-11. (Of course the information itself is old, what's new is that it's being aired on CNN.) We've been killing huge numbers of people in the Middle East for a long time. If a foreign power was doing to us what we do to them, we'd be pissed, and we'd fight back. (As they are.) Paul is right, of course -- and Blitzer is wrong. Paul is the only candidate of either party with the guts to cut through the nonsense and say what's obviously true. And Blitzer is the one that owes us an apology, for carrying the lies for so long. He's supposed to be a journalist, and his job is to be neutral and to find and tell the truth. Ron Paul is good medicine for the US political system. PS: If Giuliani is so good at protecting us, why did the attacks happen on his watch? Why no warning from Giuliani? Didn't he see it coming? Couldn't he prevent it? Why should anyone think he'd do any better if he was President?
Today's links Excerpt from last night's Republican debate cited below. Larry King doesn't use the Internet, and doesn't want to learn how to. Nik Cubrilovic: "The stats for torrent downloads are staggering." I wish I had seen the Republican debate I had a dinner in NY last night, so I missed the Republican debate. The Nation summarizes an exchange with frontrunner Rudy Giuliani and Texas Congressperson Ron Paul, who said: "Right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting." Here's the actual video. Giuliani has no basis for running on his ability to defend the country against terrorism, other than an impression that he made some people feel better when he appeared on TV after the 9-11 attacks. I didn't have a TV then, so I remain perhaps the only American who doesn't have fond memories of Giuliani, who I remember as a brash district attorney, definitely not Presidential material. New York politics, even though NY is our biggest city, is a very small little world. I'd like to see the current NY mayor, a Republican, get into the race. Unlike Giuliani, he comes from the city, not its political system, and is a genuinely smart man, who uses his brain, and his heart. And I like the effect Ron Paul is having on the Republicans. He may be their Howard Dean, four years later, and perhaps without the self-destructiveness. They need, we need, someone to connect that component of our policial system in reality, and he's doing that quite well. I don't usually watch Larry King A few weeks ago they had the entire cast of Heroes on Larry King, I'm a big fan of the show, so I watched. It was worth it, if only to hear the story of Adrian Pasdar, who plays Nathan Petrelli on the show, who is married to Natalie Maines, a Dixie Chick. When she tours, in Japan for example, she can't get the show on broadcast or cable, so she downloads it from the Internet. No one remarked that this was illegal, or could get her a big fine or jail time. Larry King didn't say a word, nor did any of his fellow cast members. No lawyer served him with a subpoena. It went unnoticed. Did a little reality leak in? On one hand, artists want their work to be seen. And the Internet reaches everywhere, including places that broadcast and cable don't. And it's the perfect time-shifter. Why shouldn't I be able to watch the Republican debate even if I happen to be in NY and eating dinner with a business associate at the time it was broadcast? Isn't it time for the entertainment industry to deal with reality, instead of making obvious deals with Alberto Gonzalez to impose insults to the Constitution and the people, in order to support their denial of technology that serves people so incredibly well. Maybe they should star in their own reality show, you could call it Network Execs in Denial. Put them on an island with a bunch of real people and Internet connectivity and watch them pull their hair out trying to explain to them why what they're doing is wrong. PS: Yaacov suggests that she was watching on this website. Interesting. Does it work in Japan??
Saturday unconference in NY On Saturday I'll be at the PDF unconference at the Pace University Student Union, One Pace Plaza, 10AM-6:15PM. It's open to the public, $35 for lunch, coffee, snacks & wifi. I'll also be at the non-unconference on Friday, part of an incredible lineup of creative bloggers and technologists who care about democracy. I return to California on Sunday. PS: If you read Scripting News and are going to the PDF meetup on Saturday, could you sign up here on my wiki, so I'll have an idea of who's coming. Maybe we can have a special meeting just for this community. PPS: MobileCamp NYC is on Saturday. I'll try to make it over there, I want to show off the NY Times River. It seems that NYers who are into mobile tech might find that interesting! What is Yahoo up to with Flickr? Read what Thomas Hawk says and give it a lot of credence. Thomas has earned our respect. He says Yahoo is unfairly deleting stuff. As a paying user of Flickr this is very disturbing to me! Yahoo, please explain. Thanks. Gotta say It's good to see Les Orchard blogging again. Photos from a morning walk in Rockaway Beach Click here for more photos.
B. Mann loses it He says he lost it when he read my post about federating Twitter last night. He says "Forget Twitter. It has a bunch of users, that's about it." And goes on to say someone should rebuild Twitter using Jabber. But having a bunch of users is very important feature. You can't just skip over it as if it didn't matter, because imho it's all that matters. Jabber is a good technological foundation. But we've learned over and over that that isn't enough to get people to use something. So many people who know technology think they know better than users. The trick is to forget that and just go where the people are. Jason wants to use Twitter. So do a lot of people. That's good enough for me. Previous citation: Twitter as coral reef. Life in prison for copyright infringement? News.com: "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including 'attempts' to commit piracy." Theory -- this is what the Democrats got to look the other way and let the Gonzales matter drop. Howard Berman, the advocate for the RIAA and MPAA, is on the House Judiciary Committee, and in general, the Democrats are the ones pushing for legislation on behalf of the entertainment industry. Also, I have no idea what attempted infringement means, but it could mean visiting a site that has BitTorrents available for download. The News.com article isn't clear about this, but apparently there are some infringements deemed so serious that the proposed penalty is life in prison.
Twitter Premium?
He says he'd pay $100 a year for a Twitter that was always fast, almost always up, and had some additional features. I sent Jason a private email which I'll now repeat here. Just FYI, because of their API, you don't really need Ev and Biz to do that for you. A bunch of us could pool resources and set up a server of our own, and peer with Twitter's. If Twitter is down it would just queue up the messages, in the meantime, anyone who was on the premium system would see the messages immediately. Wigglin Spree I find this commercial endlessly fascinating. Just love the song. And the dancing. Simple pleasures. BTW, I've been saying this for years -- why don't companies put their ads on the net? Really high quality versions. They are ads after all, they want us to watch them, right? Or what am I missing? Apparently it's sung by Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies. Here's an MP3 of the beginning of the song. Some people love the ad (like me) and others hate it. Okay there's a bit of wiggling on the Jell-o site. Not enough and not the commercial with the kid and the cow. Another day in the park Speaking of simple pleasures... It was just too lovely to spend much time blogging today. I don't remember east coast weather as nice as the last two days. Here are some pictures of turtles in the park for your entertainment.
Ideas for the TechCrunch 20 conference
I think something is missing if we start with product pitches, and don't go any further back in the gestation process. Ideally I'd like to have a discussion about a roadmap for the next ten years in Internet entrepreneurship. Which ideas of today will still be around in ten years and which won't? What problems will be solved that will change the nature of products we can make in the future? I think that's a hard nut to crack, but there are some obvious things -- for example the mythical podcast player we're always talking about. It seems that, while no startups are today producing such a product (correct?) at some point in the next ten years someone will. Yes or no? If we want to see this problem solved, because, theoretically it will enable many more companies to start, how can we create incentives? If given a chance, I'd get up and evangelize Checkbox News. I wouldn't actually be pitching it, but I'd be interested in knowing if anyone wants to work on it. A friend, Greg Stikeleather, once called this Idea Capital, it works like venture capital, but it provides a fertile idea for a group of entrepreneurs, much the way VC provides cash to stimulate the development of new entrepreneurship. That's a business I'd like to be in myself. Just after the last boom ended, I argued that VCs should set aside some of their profits in boom times to build up a stock of developed ideas to fuel the next boom. I think doing so would help diminish the familiar boom-bust cycle that Silicon Valley has been going through for all these decades.
Now it could be these kinds of things don't have a place at the TechCrunch 20 conference, that's up to Mike and Jason to decide. But I would find a conference with a broader agenda more interesting, and perhaps it would provide a reward for some of the entrepreneurs who come, beyond helping get their companies funded, and their shareholders liquid. Finally, I think of this set of ideas as nutrition for the startup community. So many times people come away from these shows feeling that nothing new was discussed. I feel strongly that the way to make sure that people feel they got their money's worth is to be deliberate, even systematic, about bringing the new ideas in. Perfect weather in NY The weather in NY today is perfect, so I took a walk in Central Park with a friend and my camera. Here's a four-picture Flickr set. Weird movie made by holding camera at side while walking. Today's links Rockbox is an "open source replacement firmware for mp3 players."
Today's links Happy 40th birthday to Nick Bradbury. He was born in the spring before the Summer of Love. NY Times: "Bonds's impending achievement would normally have the sport in a congratulatory frenzy, except that many fans view Bonds's ascendancy as the signature event of the ignominious steroids era." Two-word comment: "If Only." Wired on results from Alexa on traffic at various blogs. At least they're honest when they say it's link-baiting. Mike Shaver: "Why wouldn't you choose the web, given its record and power and openness?" Great BBQ in Berkeley
Theodore Roosevelt
Retraction & apology A couple of days ago, in documenting a misquote in a Business Week article, I theorized that the misquote was a result of "empty throwaway words that fill up all Business Week articles." While the theory accurately reflects my state of mind, which is all it purported to do, it's unfair to say all Business Week articles contain this kind of misquote, or even most. I should have said that some Business Week articles do. I apologize for this mistake. I believe they care about the quality of their publication, it was unfair to imply that they don't. The last movie I saw in a theater
My screen isn't as big as the screens in theaters, but the quality is much higher, and I sit 8 feet from the screen so in effect my screen is bigger. Then early this week, went to see SpiderMan 3 at the AMC Bay Street, a relatively new theater, which should have the latest screening equipment. The movie had just come out, so it seems the print should be in good shape. This is the first time I've been to a theater seen since upgrading my sound system, and while I had always been impressed with the sound at theaters in the past, this time I was surprised to hear how bad their system is. The one I have at home is thrilling, theirs is mushy. And the film had all kinds of defects that I never would have noticed before, but now I'm spoiled by HD. However, even normal movies that I screen at home from an ordinary DVD are better quality than what they show at a theater. I wonder why?
Tantalize me! Twitter blog: "Twitter now fully supports microformats." You don't say! Docs?? Smart Matt Matt Mullenweg: "There are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning." Haille Selassie
News you won't hear on CNN tonight ThinkProgress: "11 Republican members of Congress pleaded yesterday with President Bush and his senior aides to change course in Iraq." From Doug Kaye, via email, RSS was the question for one of the answers on today's Jeopardy. If you know what the clue was, please post a note. The future of news, part 3
BTW, part 2 of the future is Checkbox News. Part 1 is Hypercamp, the meatspace Newsroom Of The Future, although I haven't been able to successfully convince anyone to partner with me on developing it. (And it requires too much capital for me to do it on my own.) It's sad in a way to watch the various new media startups struggle to find a way to make money, because there are so many ways, they just haven't spotted them yet. Business Week misquote I know you're not supposed to object when a big print pub like Business Week quotes you, but they got it wrong, even when they quoted me verbatim from the web. I didn't think it was possible, but here it is. Here's the article, and here's the quote. I do not believe "one factor spurring the growth of unconferences is their ability to tap the smarts of the people who usually sit mute in the audience." Yet they say I believe that. I don't know if they believe it. Or if it's just some short-hand, or empty throwaway words that fill up all Business Week articles. Truth be told, most things they call unconferences are not, imho, unconferences, and don't address the question I said they should address. If you determine the schedule ad hoc, but still put speakers in front of a silent group of people, you haven't changed very much, imho. If that's spurring growth, then it's not a good kind of growth. Further, I don't think the kind of unconferences I like are actually growing. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but I like to stay grounded in the truth. When I say something is growing, I want that to mean something. So I don't say something is growing when I don't believe it is. See below, on The Scientific Method, as it applies to journalism. What I would teach a journalist, part 2 A few days ago, in response to a query from a reader at the University of Nevada, I outlined how I would start teaching Web 2.0 to journalism students. I think perhaps I said some things without explaining enough, so there were some misunderstandings. I said skip Drupal and get the ki | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I had a long shopping list for my getaway tomorrow. I went to a half-dozen stores, the experience ranged from ridiculous to sublime. 
The Mac mini is exactly the kind of product Silicon Valley should never stop making. It's the perfect platform for tinkerers in the middle of the hottest growth area for tech, the home network. I keep mine under a 46-inch Sony HD-TV. Nothing else in Apple's product line would fit except Apple TV, which doesn't do enough to interest a guy like me. I want a new much faster Mac Mini, and would pay for it. It's the most cripped Mac I own, slow at everything. Yet its the workhorse of my home network. 
Every so often I get an email asking what's up with the RSS Advisory Board.
I think it will continue to shrink until they accept bloggers and podcasters as legitimate sources of news and perspective, without interpretation by professional reporters.
As they say, you can't throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a budding entrepreneur with a pitch. The place is crawling with get-rich-quick schemes.
I spent a few hours yesterday updating the XP laptop with the broken keyboard with four years of Windows updates. As it was rebooting for the last of six times a DOS screen flashes by too quickly to read saying something about a registry error, and when I try to boot using the last good configuration it fails, and loops, flashes the same message, and never boots. I pulled the power cord and let it do this overnight until the battery ran out, hoping that maybe a power recycle might cure the problem, but this seems desperate and very unlikely to work.
When I was in NY, I picked up a couple of old Windows laptops I had left at my parents' house, out in the garage, in plastic containers. They weathered the east coast winters fine, both booted right up, one has a broken keyboard and the other runs Windows 2000. And they have files I had previously lost, so that's welcome. I'm going to back them up to DVD right away. And I'll use the one with the broken keyboard to try again to setup the Zune that Microsoft generously gave me to play with at Mix 07 in April.
I'm in a presentation by 
Just as Feedburner is part of the RSS coral reef. And rumors say they're selling their piece of the reef for $100 million to Google.
It was hard to find a place to sit down to eat lunch, wandering around I saw an open door in a room with some tables and an empty chair. Turns out it was a press conference announcing a 
Jason Calacanis is known for stimulating interesting discussion. Today is no different. 
So that's part one of the discussion. Part two is more fun -- I'd like people to talk about some crazy idea they have, ideas they don't think will get funded, but products they'd like to see nonetheless. Companies don't solve all the problems out there, some things get created with little thought of creating a company, but they end up creating opportunities for companies -- things like folksonomies, syndication, digital photography and video, blogging, podcasting. Personally, I'd like to see us make archving really work, so what we create on the web may outlive us. If there's a Hemingway or a Woody Allen out there today, they're probably creating for the Internet. How will we make sure their work survives? And of course that's just one idea. And some ideas never become commercial yet still have a potentially positive effect on our lives. 
A few weeks ago I got a new sound system for my home theater. It makes a huge difference in the experience. I've been going back and watching old favorites to see what they're like now that the sound is better than the picture. I haven't found a way to describe in words how much richer it is. 
One reason I mention this is to point out, in my own humble way, an opportunity for the movie industry, to turn theaters into fantastic movie-viewing venues, with the best equipment, cranked up for maximum effect. Honestly, I think they're going to have to do that to compete with the equipment that's making its way into the home these days. Sure I spent a fair amount of money on my setup, but if there's one thing we know for sure, the prices in home electronics go down very quickly these days. 
