Scripting News

Tue, 06 May 2003 03:49:55 GMT

As the speakers drone on and on, I am putting together my talk. I swear I won't talk for longer than three minutes without taking a breath. I am not using slides. I'm just putting together a page with pointers to give people a tour of all the elements of the infrastructure behind communities of weblogs. I'm going to show a global community (Weblogs.Com) and a local one (Harvard Law School). The cool thing is that they use the same protocols.

Tue, 06 May 2003 02:45:49 GMT

Chris Gulker is researching a crawler called Cyvelliance. He thinks it's working for the music industry and watching sites of their critics, including this site.

Tue, 06 May 2003 02:55:43 GMT

Turns out it's no big deal that I can't blog this conference. I have no idea what they're talking about. For some reason people who talk about spectrum think that everyone they talk to are expert in the same things they're expert in. I have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. "Blah blah blah blah blah. Let's get back on track here so I can continue to bore you to death with a bunch of strung-together buzzwords. Spatial filters for each user. Blah blah blah blah blah. Big piece of low-hanging fruit. I don't care if you fall asleep. Blah blah blah blah blah."

Tue, 06 May 2003 01:38:55 GMT

This review of blogging APIs is a must-read. I've been thinking about rounding out the MetaWeblog API to incorporate all the functionality of the Blogger API because Blogger is moving away from it's own API if you can believe that.

Tue, 06 May 2003 01:21:11 GMT

John Perry Barlow greeted me here at the TTI conference. We chatted a bit. He asked what I'm doing at Berkman (where he is also a fellow). "Starting lots of weblogs," I said. He said he thought weblogs are like poetry when he was in college, lots of people writing, very few people reading. I hear stuff like that all the time, often from people like Barlow who are accomplished writers in other media. It's not really a valid comparison. Much weblog writing is functional, not artistic. Jon Udell, below, writes about SpiderPhone because he wants to tell you about a piece of technology that interests him. The writing helps him sort it out, even if no one were to read it. Other examples, a weblog for a class, a weblog for a patient in a hospital. These are utilitarian things, they simply facilitate a higher level of communication. Instead of comparing it to poetry, compare it to something more prosaic, like a telephone, but of course weblog-writing is different from communicating using a telephone.

Tue, 06 May 2003 01:20:40 GMT

Jon Udell: "SpiderPhone is a really clever piece of work."

Tue, 06 May 2003 00:55:21 GMT

Ed Cone reports that blow jobs are still illegal in NC.

Mon, 05 May 2003 23:29:46 GMT

Note: I don't speak today until 3:45PM. If they have WiFi in the meeting room, I may do a lot of blogging today. PS: We do have a connection here, but they don't want me to blog the sessions publicly. I wonder if there are any Scripting News people in the audience here. If so, send me an email PPS: If you send me an email don't wait for a response. For some reason outbound email doesn't work for me.

Tue, 06 May 2003 01:15:28 GMT

Mon, 05 May 2003 21:46:45 GMT

Adam Curry found an XML aviation weather server.

Mon, 05 May 2003 23:04:13 GMT

Six years ago, one of my favorite stories.

Mon, 05 May 2003 23:25:47 GMT

Roland Piquepaille reports on the Internet in space.

Mon, 05 May 2003 23:18:51 GMT

Paul Graham: The Hundred-Year Language.

Mon, 05 May 2003 22:25:02 GMT

Sunrise in Denver was very beautiful this morning, so I pointed my camera out the window of my 23rd floor hotel room, and took some pictures. The cool thing about picture-taking in 2003 on the Internet, is that the pics may be on the Web before the sunrise in the Pacific time zone. Still have to work on making it three-step easy to take a sequence of pictures and have them on the Web without memorization and repetitive work. There's a killer app lurking in here, I can feel it.

Mon, 05 May 2003 21:47:51 GMT

I'm back in the West, now the East has been up for a few hours and it's already afternoon in Europe. I have keep reminding myself. This is the weirdest time-shift yet, going back west. Can you go "back west?"

Mon, 05 May 2003 21:49:27 GMT

The Syndication list now has a code of conduct. This apparently small event could change the way the RSS community works, in a good way. It gave me an idea on the long plane flight from NY to Denver yesterday. Should we codify the idea, perhaps with the help of lawyers, to be a charter that any mail list can adopt? Say what's allowed and not, and be sure everyone who subscribes sees it.