Scripting News

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:14:12 GMT

IT World: "RSS is a veritable hive of activity and innovation."

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:04:21 GMT

Phil Ringnalda: "It's so twisty that it makes my head spin."

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:24:27 GMT

According to an unusual post on the BloggerDev list last week, we should expect a developer preview of the new version of the Blogger API sometime today.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 15:40:54 GMT

Jon Udell: Scripting Groove Web Services.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:19:30 GMT

Popdex is like Blogdex and Daypop, but they plan to weight the links, as Google uses PageRank to give value to links.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:07:14 GMT

Ad for a movie we can wait to see.

Dinner report

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:31:34 GMT

Dinner last night was fantastic. About fifty people filled Jing Jing. Monday night is a good night to do this, there was plenty of room. Great conversations, cameras, wild food (Marc Canter did the ordering) and a fair $20 per mouth price. Lots of people came from the East Bay (Brad Neuburg got his ride from Scott Mace). Saw Chris Gulker, Nick Denton, Raines Cohen, got to hang out with the new skinny Doc, planned a blogger's conference with Doc and Scoble, met Dave Sifry, an interesting guy, and got reinvigorated on the My Weblog Outliner tool, which I will revive sometime very soon, sorry for the delay.

Hey the nicest moment of the evening, even though it was horribly embarassing, was the enthusiastic round of applause I got when I walked into the restaurant and saw the scene. The cool thing about weblogs is that today in 2002, it attracts the nicest, smartest, and most ambitious people. We kicked butt at the conference during the day, leading Kevin Werbach to say that bloggers rule the world, or something like that, to which I say It's about time y'all figured that out and stop sending PR people to explain technology to us, and be prepared to answer the tough questions, and also be prepared to build on our work. Nothing is more frustrating than a BigCo who sends a glad-hander to tell you how they're going to fail at reinventing everything you had working three years ago.

At the dinner a list circulated and instead of signing our names we all entered the URLs of our blogs. Very good. I hope that somehow makes it on to the Web today. After dinner a few of us went for coffee where we ran into Megnut, Cory Doctorow and Lisa Rein who is in town for the Elcomsoft vs Adobe trial. I asked who she's covering it for. "Myself," she said with a confident grin. I felt like I had asked a stupid question, which of course I had.

Long Islanders

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:47:38 GMT

One of the cool things about Dave Sifry is that he's from Long Island. I'm from Queens, basically, through NJ and the Bronx, and of course Long Islanders don't think of people from Queens as being from Long Island, but technically, we qualify. Just look at a map. It's all one island, or if you're from there and speak the gutteral local lingo, one gisland.

Anyway, Dave and I hit if off right away, probably because we share this culture, we could almost be family. Watching Mitch Kapor speak yesterday I had the same feeling, but stronger. We could be cousins. Mitch is from Long Gisland too (I think, if he's not he should be). When I raised my hand to ask Mitch a question he called on me in a very kind way, asking me first how long he and I had been friends. It's been a long time, I think we met first at the 1979 West Coast Computer Faire, when Dan Fylstra had hired him to be the New Product Manager at Personal Software. That's a lot of continuity. I think it says something about Mitch's longevity, and perhaps my own, that 23 years later we're still kicking around, trying out new ideas, having people listen to what we have to say, etc etc.

I think it's super important that what Mitch knows get into the software system of the early 21st Century. I don't care if it's open source or commercial, his mind is very unique and talented, and I want his software.