Scripting News

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:18:59 GMT

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:56:21 GMT

"A non-smoking weblog for 500 days."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:27:29 GMT

Last year on this day: Weblogs.Com for RSS.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 23:45:39 GMT

Chris Lydon interviews Stirling Newberry. "He is the blogger who wrote earlier this month: 'By the time you read these words the bell will be tolling for Wesley Clark's candidacy.' And thus he crystallized a contest between people who drafted Clark and those who manage him; between analog and digital politics; between the Pyramid and the Sphere, as Newberry likes to illustrate it."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:25:23 GMT

Joshua Brauer: "Should web crawlers respect robots.txt files on government sites?"

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:39:51 GMT

BTW, while they were ramping up to the PDC, I worked privately with Microsoft developer relations people to make sure that the RSS support for this major news event would be perfect. It was a total pleasure working with them. Here's the main feed for news linked to from the home page of the Longhorn site. It's so sweet. I think anyone with a basic understanding of the Web could understand it. No locked trunks. That's very very cool. Thanks Microsoft.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:03:55 GMT

Don Park: "Scoble, give us a screenshot that will pop my eyeballs, something that justifies all the hype."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:09:54 GMT

Feedster has a special page of PDC news.

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 01:54:28 GMT

Phillip Pearson likens Longhorn development to XUL.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:17:44 GMT

Jeremy Allaire is reporting from the PDC. It seems after skimming the various reports, that the innovation in Longhorn is in the plumbing. I'm with Don Park, I haven't seen anything that gets me going. I think it's interesting that Don Box's demos were about posting to his weblog. Note that Microsoft doesn't run videos that make real weblog software look hopelessly out of date, like Apple did with Marc Canter's software (and mine, btw). Ten developer relations points for MS. However, there's got to be something better they can do with all the R&D money they spend. This feels like a reinvention, and wheel-spinning. Can't tell for sure. Scoble, is there a technical summary of what was announced? One that doesn't assume too much depth in Microsoft lingo?

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 21:49:23 GMT

Gina Smith, one the regulars in our San Francisco gang now has a weblog and it's gooood. She's had an incredible life. Here's a picture of Gina interviewing Walter Cronkite. And lookin good addressing the Steel Industry in 1999.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:28:09 GMT

Question. The Columbia Journalism Review article about the history of weblogs is wrong. They don't list the author's email address or provide a place for comments. I've posted two public notices here on my weblog. No response. What's the next step? I think the CJR is authoritative. If so, we must get this corrected, asap. Do I channel this through Harvard? If so, how? (Postscript: I believe I now have the author's email address thanks to Seth Finkelstein. I have sent an email. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.)

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 21:03:06 GMT

AP: Red Sox fire manager. Obviously he made some incredibly good decisions over the season. Only two teams did better than the Sox. Could they have won? Yeah they could have. They didn't, but sheez, what happened to their sense of humor? What happened to the Red Sox philosophy? They should beg him to come back. What's next, are they going to fire the Green Monster because the team wasn't number one. Mark your calendars. 2003 -- the year the Red Sox became the Yankees.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 21:00:32 GMT

AP: "Howard Dean is maintaining his lead among likely voters in the New Hampshire presidential primary, despite the entrance of retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark into the race, according to a new poll."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 20:59:34 GMT

Josh Marshall: "No More Contributions!"

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:41:06 GMT

Peter Rukavina on the CBC and RSS.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:10:57 GMT

Jon Udell on Apple's Knowledge Navigator vision.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 21:01:06 GMT

Marc Canter: "Apple sucked the energy out of the nascent multimeida industry by making promises that were unachievable."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:00:14 GMT

Kicking Ass, the DNC weblog, on robots.txt disabling of caches on White House pages about Iraq. Interesting point. Now would be an appopriate time to ask the Democrats if they will have a different policy should a Democrat be elected to the White House in 2004.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:44:42 GMT

Rogers Cadenhead's Radio UserLand KickStart is shipping. A sample chapter on Radio's outliner. And even though Amazon is still a patent abuser, here's a link to a page where you can buy the book. I can't recommend that you buy it from Amazon, but Rogers seems to want the book to rise through the ranks there, so I'll play along. It's also available on Barnes & Noble.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 15:22:33 GMT

Wired: DirecTV Takes No Prisoners.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:06:48 GMT

NY Times: "With Cable TV at MIT, Who Needs Napster?"

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:32:20 GMT

Andrew Grumet (at MIT): "The project looks to me like a legal hack more than anything else."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:42:36 GMT

Lessig likes the idea: "Most universities have a blanket license for music distributed on campus."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:56:05 GMT

Gary Wolf wants to know what you think of the Dean campaign.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:50:58 GMT

News.Com interview with a Canadian law professor on issues related to "cyberpiracy."

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 15:02:25 GMT

Halley Suitt narrates a user's experience with a new piece of software.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:34:36 GMT

Reality lies somewhere betw Cringely and Ballmer and Linus. How about this. Both guys (Ballmer and Torvalds) make really shitty software. Microsoft, after decades of Windows development still can't make a robust operating system that a normal person can use. And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere. And the user interface of Linux sucks. Windows isn't totally terrible. It's a huge embarassment that with many billions of dollars, dozens of years, and billions of man-hours, this is the best the human species can produce.

Thanks to Canada

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:18:41 GMT

I had a wonderful time at two very different conferences. The first, NextMedia, was a descendent of Apple devcon's and Microsoft CD-ROM conferences. It would be hard to throw a pot sticker into the room and not hit someone who developed for Macromedia. They use the Web, but they prefer Shockwave, and will use Flash if they absolutely have to. Because it's Canada they have lots of money (this was a surprise). There were probably more Australians and Brits at the conference than Americans. They joke about how unaware we are of Canada. Even though it was just a 3 hour plane trip, with a connection in Halifax, they're right. There's so much we don't know about Canada.

My presentation, which closed the conference, will be available on MP3, I'm told. Highlight, the interviewer, Andrew Cochran, was rolling through Scripting News mottos, and when he said "It's even worse than it appears," the crowd broke into laughter. This is the first confirmation that other people see the irony. It's an elegant motto. Also, they called people who participated in the conference "delegates," which I think is a really good phrase-turn. So much better than "audience" which is a word I'm trying to strike from my vocabulary.

About a half-hour drive from Charlottetown (pronounced Charle-town), at the seaside resort of Cavendish (mostly closed now for the winter) was the Zap Your PRAM conference, put on by young geeks from PEI, of which there are quite a few, and unlike geeks elsewhere, they have plenty of work. I got a ride from Jevon MacDonald, who reminded me of Nicolai, the kind geek who drove me from the Copenhagen airport to Reboot a few years back. I had dinner with two beautiful and super-smart librarians on Saturday night, Lisa Sloniowski and Mita Sen-Roy, and Art Rhyno, Lisa and Mita's house geek, and Stephen Regoczei, a professor from Trent, and we sang Alice's Restaurant and Que Sera Sera. Yes, we had a little to drink. Just a little. ";->"

I especially enjoyed Rob Patterson's talk about the philosophical context of weblogs, and we're going to do some broadcast collaborations with John Muir from Trent Radio.

There was lots of love in both rooms, had a great time, thanks to Canada, our friendly neighbor to the north. I invited everyone to come to a Thursday at Harvard and let's work together to tie our universities and libraries together, and create new business opportunities for everyone. Canada is close. Let's have fun.