Scripting News

CNN

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:29:28 GMT

I've been watching CNN this morning as I drink coffee and catch up on news on the web.

They've covered two stories in 1/2 hour: 1. There's a 12-year-old boy lost in the woods in North Carolina (I think, based on the accents, they haven't said). 2. They broke away from that story for about a minute to tell us about VP Cheney's doctor's appointment, checking up on a leg condition. Then back to the 12-year-old's father, who talks about how happy he is to hear that his boy is safe. They're now repeating it. Is anything else going on? Not on CNN.

So I switch to MSNBC, and damn if they aren't covering exactly the same story. Same on Fox.

In six years he may well be a soldier, in Iraq, fighting for his life, and they'll be obsessing about another 12-year-old.

PS: I turned off the TV and tuned in the WNYC webcast. At least public radio hasn't sold out yet. Three American soldiers died in Iraq today. Roadside bombs. President Bush is standing by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. The President is going to Kansas City today. 3000 more emails were disclosed today in the scandal brewing around the fired US Attorneys.

PPS: At 7:30PM, I thought I'd catch up on the news on TV, after seeing Bush's press conference this afternoon, I thought there would be an interesting discussion. Is this Watergate all over again (seems that way to me, as the President gets into coverup mode, but he's bluffing, he can't hold the line, I'm sure of it). Nope, Anderson Cooper is covering the lost Carolina kid. His chubby dad is on screen, finally even he looks tired. Glad the kid is okay. Sorry our country is so fucked.

Bush's destiny?

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:12:34 GMT

The blog bootstrap

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:30:06 GMT

CNet searches for the creator of the first blog. That would be Tim Berners-Lee, whose first website was, in every way, a blog. A couple of comments. 1. Not sure how he tried to get in touch but I never got a call or an email. 2. I don't want to take anything away from anyone else. Lots of people made weblogs what they are today. Why not be inclusive. 3. They call me "irascible." Not sure if I've met either of the authors in person, I wonder how they formed that opinion and why they feel the need to label people like that.

In another, related article they interview the creator of Finger, who says the ideas of blogging originated in bulletin boards.

In any case, with all due respect, I think the CNet article misses something important as they make light of my claim to having bootstrapped blogging. The first blogs were inspired by this blog, in fact many of them, including Barger's Robot Wisdom, used my software. If you go to BlogTree, a site that asks bloggers to say which sites inspired them, you'll see how many self-declare as originating from the Scripting News community. How you summarize that effect is up to you, I call it a bootstrap.

I was trying to disperse the community that developed around this blog, from the beginnig. The goal being to inspire other people to do the same as I was doing. Jason Kottke once called me the Johnny Appleseed of blogging, and that's something I'm happy with. That was my intention.

To people who say the ideas were obvious, I don't think they were. I tried to convince many, including leading VCs and tech companies, to help bootstrap blogging, but I was left to do it myself.

Stuck tech

Peter Rip, a man I've never met, but would like to, wrote an amazingly insightful article about where we're at in web applications these days.

"The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today."

I have lots of ideas I'd like to share about where we can go with the formats we already have, but I can't get past the gatekeepers at the conferences Mr Rip mentions in his piece.

Today's links

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:39:29 GMT

OpenCongress: Iraq bill tests the Democratic leadership's skills.