Scripting News

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 14:39:29 GMT

Ed Cone announces the journalism session at BC with Scott Rosenberg, Glenn Reynolds, and Joshua Marshall.

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 18:27:47 GMT

Brad Choate: "United States Patent No. 4,558,302 expires today. Better known as the LZW patent. This is the technology behind the common GIF file."

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:01:44 GMT

More great scans from Adam.

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:24:27 GMT

Three years ago today I visited with Napster and took pictures, of course. This one made it into a history book of computer science. My favorite is this one of VP-Engineering Eddie Kessler, smiling for the camera.

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:33:13 GMT

Six years ago today, a story about boys and adventure.

The role of technology at BloggerCon

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:57:51 GMT

Last night someone listed the three big areas we're going to cover at BloggerCon, before I said anything, and got it right. Something must be working. The three areas: Politics, Education and Journalism.

Notable in its absence: Technology. It's no accident. Weblog technology is advanced enough today in 2003 to be out of the way. There will be steady improvement, I hope, but users have choice, and the choices are good enough to get the job done.

But technology will be everywhere at BloggerCon, but if it's doing its job well it will be transparent. People won't be thinking "Oh that's important technology" they'll say "What an interesting idea."

Meg Hourihan on WMAWAW

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:14:46 GMT

Meg read my What Makes A Weblog A Weblog essay, and sent an email (from Copenhagen) explaining that I missed the fundamental difference between weblogs and everything else.

She says: "The biggest thing I keep stressing, which I think is the fundamental difference: posts vs pages. It's about posts, chunks of content, not pages, which is what wikis are, and it's the content that Vignette and Interwoven output. They treat the chunks of content as pages, and they don't see the more discrete bits that are the posts."

A new session for BloggerCon

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:04:59 GMT

Last night at the Thursday Berkman weblog writers meeting we talked about BloggerCon.

We covered so much ground in two hours, it's impossible to report it all. But there's one idea I want to talk about here this morning because it's important idea and I want to get out there way before October.

A question to the group -- how do we use Chris Lydon -- a great interviewer, the radio version of Charlie Rose. Chris was in the room, and he took the floor and started talking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his relationship to weblogs and radio. I didn't get it, but I liked the way it sounded. Then someone else talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations. Then politics, hey they're conversations too, and so is education. Wait a minute weblogs are conversations. Whuh.

It's hard to describe the feeling in the room at that moment, it's the same thing that's been interesting to me about Chris, his radio and my Radio seem to be flipsides of the same thing. And I've said to Doc that weblogs are the implementation of the Cluetrain, and he agrees.

So we're going to put these two people on stage, Chris and Doc, and add one more person (who I haven't talked to yet) and maybe one more after that, and see what happens. It won't be a panel, it'll be a conversation. Duh.

Kendall's Amazing Puzzle

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:22:50 GMT

Kendall Clark: "Like it or not, the web services part of the Web's future is being developed by the largest computer corporations almost entirely in terms of standards bodies."

This used to be Clay Shirky's line. And before that News.Com believed it. And before that there was a whole industry waiting with baited breath for the next pronouncement from IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Lotus, you name it. Lots of waiting for trains that never came. This one won't come either.

What if Kendall really understood the Law of Expectation, you see what you expect to see. A statement like his tells me more about his filters, his experience, than it does about web services, the Web's future, ie the things it purports to be about.