Scripting News

Representing Pownce data in RSS?

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 21:28:40 GMT

I'm here at lunch in Palo Alto with Nik Cubrilovic.

We're talking about Pownce, Twitter and Facebook.

In Pownce each item can be one of four types: 1. Message. 2. Link. 3. File. 4. Event.

#1, #2 and #3 can easily be represented as an RSS 2.0 item. A message just has a <description>. A link has a description and a <link>. A file has an <enclosure>, but -- what about an Event? How would you represent that in a RSS item?

Thoughts??

Brooklyn after the Dodgers left

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 04:17:39 GMT

On the morning of my birthday in 1985 my brother made sure I was out of the office all morning before we went to lunch at MacArthur Park, across from the train station in downtown Palo Alto. He led me into a special dining room where about a hundred people where assembled singing Happy Birthday.

Back then MacArthur Park was the Silicon Valley business restaurant, just as Hyatt Rickey's was the business hotel. It was before Il Fornaio and Spago or even Jing Jing or Siam Garden. We were young, it was our world, and we had a place to eat and talk deals.

I had lunch there today. While the menu was the same, the food was poorly prepared, and the place had an empty feeling. Maybe this is how Brooklyn felt after the Dodgers left. Sad to see a place so far past its prime, a place that held so many memories, but it seems unlikely that it will hold new memories for the current generation of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. That's gotta be happening some place else.

Thanks to Joel Spolsky

Every so often I get a link from Joel, and the traffic goes through the roof. Lots of people read his blog, because he's smart and he knows how to tell a story.

Today he points to a piece I wrote on January 1 of this year about what makes a blog a blog.

BTW, he says that I don't allow comments on Scripting News. That's not exactly true, there are comments here, but you have to look carefully to find them. I find this ups the quality enormously -- people don't generally comment here to embarass anyone or to provoke a fight -- there isn't enough traffic to interest those people. But the people who want to add information to a thread here on Scripting News, and have been reading the site long enough to know what it's about, they find their way to the comments and add something to the mix.

For example, Mark Smith, in response to a piece I wrote yesterday about Facebook, explains the phenomenon from the point of view of a thoughtful blogger.

Comments about the OPML 2.0 spec

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:13:19 GMT

A couple of good posts with suggested changes to the OPML 2.0 spec.

I'm linking to them here so I can come back to them later when I have time to review them, consider the requests, and possibly revise the spec. Thanks.

To be clear, I'm looking for errors or oversights in the spec, not suggestions for the format. The spec has been in draft form since March of last year. Right now I'm just looking for issues that should be fixed before the spec is frozen.

Looks like Friday is South Bay Day

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:16:23 GMT

Last week I spent Friday in the Palo Alto area, and today I'm headed down there for some meetings.

Next Friday is the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital. Looks like Fridays are turning into Silicon Valley Day for Dave.