Scripting News

Bill Clinton, First Lady

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:49:42 GMT

Music-lovers liability insurance?

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:36:14 GMT

I was watching RIAA president Cary Sherman on CNN this morning. A reasonable guy, with a straight pitch. We know our future is on the Internet. We want people to enjoy music. We don't mind if you make copies of the music but don't go into competition with us, don't distribute the music. Hard not to sympathize when he says it so reasonably.

They got a $222K judgement against a Minnesota woman yesterday. We're thinking about it. And of course that's what the RIAA wants us to do, right. Think. Okay. We're thinking. Hopefully they'll do some thinking too.

First, Sherman seems so reaonable, makes me wonder if a negotiation is possible. I've always said I want to pay, but like Sherman, I want it to be reasonable. I've already purchased music on vinyl, then tape, then CD, if I'm going to do it again on the Internet I want a better deal than last time.

We got a good piece of what we want with the Amazon MP3 store. But I'd like to buy music in bulk, in MP3 form. Like I said, I don't mind paying, a reasonable amount of money. Half-terabyte disks cost $150, and the prices keep coming down. I'd like to go down to Fry's and buy a half-terabyte of music (they're not going to like this) for another $100. I'd like it already installed on the hard disk. Put the RIAA brand on it if you like. Make a deal with Seagate?

Anyway, I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

Another idea.

How about music-lover's liability insurance?

Companies, even small startups, buy director's liability insurance. Without it they'd never get high net worth individuals to serve on their board.

How about RIAA and MPAA insurance. Pay $1000 per year and download all you want, sure that if the RIAA wins a judgement against you, you're covered.

I bet a lot of people would go for it. Think of the peace of mind it would buy.

Then hopefully, the RIAA would get the idea that they could cut out the middleman.

PS: William Smith thinks someone is doing it.

PPS: Kim Jong Il may need some MLLI?

Virgin America travel day tomorrow

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:08:52 GMT

Flying from SFO to JFK on Virgin America.

Should be interesting. Power at the seats so I'm not going to bring an extra battery. They have USB ports, not sure what they do. For charging devices with USB chargers? No wifi yet. I'll take pics with my iPhone. People are curious about this airline. Me too.

Apparently it's really hot in the east. I'm still going to pack a couple of sweaters. It could get cold in NY in early-mid-October.

A bit of feedback to anyone at Virgin America who might read this. Your site could work a lot better with Firefox on a Mac. Come on! You're based in SF, not Redmond.

Ooops, look what happened when I tried to print my boarding pass. Repeatable.

Today's links

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:19:57 GMT

Boston blogger dinner, Oct 18, 6PM.

Lance Knobel on the WSJ personal pages.

Declan McCullagh analyzes the RIAA victory in Minnesota.

Tim O'Reilly on the "Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm."

Living room

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:17:17 GMT

Cloud & tree

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:35:45 GMT

Integrating multiple apps & services

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:41:16 GMT

Fred Wilson: "When will people start building apps/services that sit on top of multiple APIs?"

It's a good question, and the answer is -- we're already doing it. The services are now so reliable and flexible that you almost forget how complex the systems are.

Let's look at a Twittergram scenario:

1. Chris registers with the Twittergram site. That's App #1.

2. She takes out her iPhone and opens the phone app. That's App #2. (Yes, the mobile device is also a computer, it's running an app, with an interface, it can dial a number and transmit audio. It's old fashioned, but it works great.)

2. She calls BlogTalkRadio, 646-716-6000. That's app #3. Records a 30-second message.

3. She hangs up. BlogTalkRadio calls the Twittergram app. App #1, again.

4. Twittergram calls Amazon S3 to store the MP3. App #4.

5. Twittergram calls TInyUrl to create a short URL for the MP3. That's App #5.

5. Twittergram calls Twitter. That's App #6.

So there's a simple application that uses six different apps/services.

Another example, the Flickr-to-Twitter integration, also part of Twittergram.

1. Randy registers with the Twittergram site. That's app #1.

2. He goes to the park, sees a beautiful flower. Takes a picture with his iPhone. That's app #2.

3. He mails the picture to Flickr. That's app #3.

4. Twittergram is monitoring Randy's RSS 2.0 feed on Flickr. Some people might say this is another app, but let's be conservative. App #3, again.

5. It notices a new picture, grabs the URL, calls TinyUrl. That's App #4.

6. Grabs the title of the picture, appends the TInyUrl, sends it to Twitter. That's App #5.

Another app that uses five different apps/services.

We've been doing this stuff for a long time, all the way back to 1998, when XML-RPC first came online. It's always been about delivering functionality, quietly and reliably, to users.

Techmeme is officially a cesspool

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:04:55 GMT

It was intriguing for a day or two, but now it's clear that the Leaderboard was the dumbest idea ever, because now more than ever, people are gaming Techmeme so they can climb the list.

Reminds me of something Ted Turner once said about how the Forbes list of richest people in the world was the worst thing ever for philanthropy. If you're super-rich, now you don't want to give it away because when you do, you move down (or off) the list.

Techmeme was already severely polluted by people saying stupid shit to rise to the top of the page. That was an ephemeral high. Now there's a way to accumulate points toward more persistent rank, and everyone who isn't on the list, wants to be on the list.

I'm thinking of this idiotic post by an idiot who's known for saying idiotic things just to get attention.

Or Scoble, who started on the list near the bottom -- is rapidly rising. How's he doing it? By saying extreme things that people will react to. That's how you get points in the Techmeme universe. Scoble ain't no idiot. If he wants to rise on the list, he rises.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Well, this ain't blogging, and we're still getting ready to start a war with Iran, and the stock market is still acting weird, and there are still big ideas out there to pursue, and now Techmeme isn't even worth reading when the top item on a weekday is guaranteed to be some idiot procliaming himself king of the hill. It's worse than AM talk radio.

PS: A piece I wrote in May offering a vision for "Web 3.0."

PPS: Mike Arrington weighs in. "Gabe sometimes edits stuff like this off of TechMeme to keep it stocked with real news." Hmmm. I'd be surprised if that were true.

My podcatcher is a publishing tool

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:11:57 GMT

I was subscribed to too many podcasts, my old podcatcher was downloading far more than I'd listen to.

So when I started the project to write a new podcatcher, I decided to start with a clean slate, and go for a minimalist set, the ones I really listen to, and add slowly, and make it very easy to remove or suspend a feed.

And as I announced on Tuesday, my podcatcher has a Twitter account, if you're interested in background programming while you twit the day away.

http://twitter.com/podc

And yesterday I took another item off the to-do list, and came up with a public web page that shows my podcatcher's discoveries in reverse-chronologic order.

http://dave.podcatch.com/downloads.html

This will develop of course, what you're seeing is totally pre-alpha, not even 1.0.

Would it be news?

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:04:06 GMT

I wonder if it would make news if The New Yorker article by Sy Hersh was the most pointed to page on the web.

Random evening pre-walk nonsense

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:23:58 GMT

When John Furrier started Podtech I told him to open a permanent blogger's space with great production facilities South of Market in San Francisco near Moscone. The press room for SF tech bloggers (professional press would be welcome too). He did a strange rendition of the idea, not at all what I had in mind at CES, called Bloghaus. I mention it now, because Loic is doing almost exactly what I asked Furrier for. His place isn't close to Moscone, it's in Potrero Hill, not close enough to BART into the city to visit. But there is parking, and what Loic lacks in location he makes up in charm. There's much more to his story, I hope to get some stock, so I guess I should disclaim that up front.

Sy Hersh's New Yorker article on America's plans for war in Iran. Scary shit. Must read.

The Older link is back in Twitter, along with a surprise, the UI has been spruced up and made to work in Firefox. We are reluctant to complain about Twitter, so it's very nice when they fix problems we never complained about. I'm having lunch next Tuesday in NYC with Fred Wilson, and plan to talk a bit about Twitter then. Fred is the VC with the arrows in his back. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The playoffs have started. The Mets are resting. I get work done when the Mets aren't in post-season play. The old silver lining thing. Wait till next year!

Communication is vital when there's an outage

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:34:56 GMT

This morning a key element of the Twitter user interface went missing, the "older" link at the bottom of every page. Without it, it's as if there was no past. Unless you're glued to Twitter around the clock, or follow very few people, you're going to miss some of what's happening. I like to keep up with it all. There was lots of speculation about where it went, and whether the disappearance was temporary or permanent.

At some point during the morning, a post appeared on the Twitter weblog explaining: "This is not a permanent change." Okay. That's good news. I was seriously thinking about what life would be like without Twitter, and didn't like the feeling. Now I know at some point the link is coming back, and the functionality behind it (also missing temporarily) and I can relax.

While you're deep in the server logs, and trying to figure out what's going wrong, it's hard to remember that there are people out there wondering what's going on. Over time, the frustration builds, but right now the Twitter community is still in its Happy To Use Something New phase, so everyone took it in stride and with good humor.

Suggestion: There's this perfect space on every user's page where they can communicate with the users. Make it easy for the staff to quickly post a note there, perhaps saying nothing more more that "we're working on it" -- to help keep the users in the loop.

Introducing Loic's new company

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:09:55 GMT

Random evening thoughts

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:00:39 GMT

Are we going to start a war with Iran? Listen to the Terry Gross interview with Seymour Hersh. What will Iran do after we attack? The British are evacuating Basra, will Iran invade to fill the vacuum? What will Bush do then? And will Iran move into Afghanistan? They share a long border. Will Pakistan then move into Afghanistan? Hersch says it will be a 20 year war. He can't imagine a President of the US trying everything before going that route, yet, of course, Bush is doing nothing. At this point, knowing what we know about Bush, we are complicit if we do nothing.

Don Park advocates comment gardening.

We have many beautiful streets in Berkeley.

Microsoft announces a new Zune in the NY Times. Okay, but did they seed any bloggers? Feels like they keep going over our heads. I've heard nothing from Microsoft PR. Do I have to buy a Zune to evaluate it? Unless it's an unqualified home run, wouldn't it be smart to first market it to people who might work with them to smooth it out? They say they want to build community. Wouldn't it make sense to use the communities that are already interested in this stuff?? (BTW, it looks like Engadget and Gizmodo didn't get briefed.)

Music is great too

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:53:51 GMT

I love podcasts, I take a walk every day, and listen to whoever Terry Gross is interviewing, or Tim Russert. I love it all, but sometimes there's no substitute for a great schmaltzy song and some of them never seem to get old, they just get better.

One of those songs is You and Me Babe, from the Ringo album. I've said it before, this album is really the last Beatles album, all four of the Beatles write, produce and perform. To me, a Beatles fan since I was a Mets fan, it's a beautiful album, there are reprises from some of the great post-Beatles music of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon. And I love it even more because it's all got the Little Help From My Friends spirit that RIngo embodied.

I dare you to listen to that song without smiling.

Can iTunes do this? :-)

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:33:48 GMT

My podcatcher has its own Twitter account, which everyone can follow.

http://twitter.com/podc

Right now it doesn't subscribe to very many feeds, just the ones I try to stay current on. You'll get at most one or two podcasts a day, except Sunday, when you'll get at least four, Murphy-willing: Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Face the Nation and 60 Minutes.

Of course you don't have to listen to any of them, but you can, with a single mouse click. And you're notified within an hour of when they're available.

BTW, this is a feature of my podcatcher, when it's released. Heh heh *cough* tease *cough* heh heh.

What is Google doing?

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:58:03 GMT

I use Google for a lot of things. I trust them not to screw with my data. I trust them to keep their hands off things they shouldn't touch and their eyes out of places they don't belong.

For example, I have confidential conversations using Gmail with execs at companies that compete with Google. At one time, when I ran UserLand and they owned Blogger, I actually competed with them myself. The fact that I continue to use Gmail shows that I have a lot of trust in the ethics of the people who work at Google.

I also use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic on my site. I allow them to run ads on a few sites that I run as a community service, to compensate me for hosting costs. From time to time, I run ads myself. I keep financial data in Google's spreadsheet.

If things were different I might use Feedburner. Especially on weekday mornings it's amazing how much traffic one file, my RSS 2.0 feed, gets. So it occurs to me that I could streamline things simply by offloading that file to Google. Now that they own Feedburner, this is something I might do, if they take a pledge not to break aggregators that depend on the format of my feed not changing. If someday my feed were to change format and break just one person reading it, I would consider that a serious support issue. It's not something I want to take a chance with. Some people trust me in this way. Not so many people as Google, but to me, they're very important. Could I delegate that trust to Google? No, not at this time.

There's another side to it. Even though I don't choose to use Feedburner, because I subscribe to the feeds of people who do, I am effected when they change the format of their feeds. When Google does this they inevitably break products that compete with theirs, the most obvious being Google Reader, but there are also server-side products that compete with Google's that depend on being able to read RSS feeds. If all of a sudden a large number of those feeds become invisible to them, people would find their services less useful, and therefore less competitive. This is exactly the kind of behavoir that made Microsoft such a bad corporate citizen in the 90s as they tried to suffocate the web to protect Windows and Office.

Now, amazingly, it seems as if Google may be doing this. I've seen it myself, files that mysteriously change format and break apps and users, and I've heard about it from a couple of developers. No one has said anything publicly, that I know of.

So, as a responsible corporation, it seems that Google should say something. What's their policy about breaking users of Feedburner, and people who read their feeds? Is this something they will do quietly, a sort of "silent data loss," or do they feel the need to be public about such policies? And what other products will they mess with this way. Will someday I look in my spreadsheet files and find that Google has changed the numbers? Or will emails from execs at Yahoo contain racial slurs or outright lies? See how much damage Google can do because we trust them?

I honestly don't know what they're doing, and I don't want to guess. I'd like them to come forward and explain.

Seth E: "Someone asked me yesterday to sign a petition to have remove JewWatch, a anti-semitic weblist of powerful Jews, removed from Google¹s search-engine."

Nice to be #1 at something

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:28:07 GMT

Fred Wilson noticed that on the new TechMeme list, his blog is the sixth written by a person. Mine is first.

Ben Metcalfe raised a similar question earlier today, noting that TechMeme didn't differentiate between professional publications like the NY Times, Reuters and CNET and TechCrunch, Engadget and GigaOm. It's not clear what the distinction is. I don't see any of those pubs as being blogs, so I think Gabe did the right thing, just lump them all together and let god (or mashups) sort them out.

A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard -- it's clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes.

So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I'm interested in knowing what people think.

Speaking of being #1, this blog is first on MSN for bricked iPhone. Needless to say it's generating some traffic.

Optimizing Flickr RSS reads

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:16:40 GMT

There's a lot you can do with the Flickr API, I've pretty much mastered it, and it may look a bit intimidating at first, but it's well designed, and once you learn how to do one set of calls you pretty much know how to do the others. I would have relied more heavily on XML-RPC encoding for uploading pictures, but now that I've been uploading pictures for a couple of months, the pain of developing that glue is fading.

BTW, I've got glue for the OPML Editor, it should work well in Radio or Frontier. I've exported a snapshot of the system.verbs.apps.Flickr, for all to use. It may be included in any distribution. (To be clear, OPML Editor users don't need this, it's already in the update stream, just choose Update opml.root from the File menu.)

Anyway, I want to expand the Flickr/Twitter experiment, but before I do that I wanted to check with the Flickr folk because this service does a lot of polling of their RSS feeds. I suggested it might make sense to create a service that would allow a caller to find out which of the feeds its interested in have changed since the last time it checked.

They responded with a simpler feature, they implemented a Last-Modified header on the RSS feeds, so that you could skip processing if a feed you're interested in hadn't changed. I've now updated my code so it does that, and everything seems to work. You'll find the script at Flickr.readFeed. Here's a text listing of the script.

A new top 100?

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:43:39 GMT

12PM: The TechMeme Leaderboard site is live.

Like almost everyone else, I keep track of who's pointing to me in Technorati, a service that was created in a Thanksgiving programming binge by David Sifry, based on the output of (my own labor of love) weblogs.com.

Technorati grew to become a blog search engine, and much more, but as Mike Arrington points out on TechCrunch, their unique position has been whittled down by other blog search engines who are doing a better job technically. Not hard, since Technorati is famously unreliable.

Technorati is also famous for its top 100 list, ranking blogs according to the number of in-bound links. Scripting News started out as the #1 blog on Technorati, and occupied a top 10 slot for a long time, until they changed the algorithm to place less weight on long-term links, so Technorati's list became a measure of recent popularity. News sites, that aren't actually blogs (imho) became the mainstay of Technorati's list. Today, Scripting News is solidly in the second 100 on Technorati.

Last night Mike Arrington got a scoop, as he so often does, that there's a new list coming soon, from TechMeme, that ranks the sites based on some other measure, which is not (yet) understood in detail. Mike also has a screen shot, which teases, by showing that TechCrunch is number 1 (all those scoops make a diff) followed by Engadget and the New York Times. The Techmeme list doesn't pretend to know what is a blog or isn't they rate all sites regardless or race, creed or color.

But Mike's screen shot teases, stopping at #30. What about the rest of the list? There are a hundred or more bloggers who want to know if they made the list, and if so, where they are. Brilliant marketing by Gabe, and damn you Mike.

So I begged Gabe for the list, and he relented, and sent me an OPML file containing the data which I then turned into the list below. Enjoy!

  1. TechCrunch

  2. Engadget

  3. New York Times

  4. Ars Technica

  5. CNET News.com

  6. Read/WriteWeb

  7. GigaOM

  8. BBC

  9. InfoWorld

10. Wall Street Journal

11. The Register

12. Reuters

13. Silicon Alley Insider

14. paidContent.org

15. Between the Lines

16. Gizmodo

17. Google Operating System

18. eWEEK.com

19. Search Engine Land

20. Computerworld

21. Crave: The gadget blog

22. Associated Press

23. TorrentFreak

24. Webware.com

25. VentureBeat

26. The Unofficial Apple Weblog

27. Business Week

28. CrunchGear

29. Business Wire

30. Google Blogoscoped

31. Techdirt

32. Microsoft

33. Bits

34. Rough Type

35. DailyTech

36. Scripting News

37. mathewingram.com/work

38. PR Newswire

39. CenterNetworks

40. The Boy Genius Report

41. ZDNet

42. Guardian

43. All about Microsoft

44. PC World

45. Wired News

46. Inquirer

47. AppleInsider

48. Epicenter

49. Tech Trader Daily

50. Washington Post

51. Forbes

52. Bloomberg

53. Times of London

54. Apple

55. BoomTown

56. InformationWeek

57. Publishing 2.0

58. Scobleizer

59. A VC

60. iLounge

61. Download Squad

62. All Facebook

63. Financial Times

64. Boston Globe

65. Electronista

66. Yodel Anecdotal

67. apophenia

68. Official Google Blog

69. Google Public Policy Blog

70. USA Today

71. Compete Blog

72. AdAge

73. Apple 2.0

74. WebProNews

75. Mashable!

76. New York Post

77. Googling Google

78. iPhone Central

79. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

80. NEWS.com.au

81. DigiTimes

82. Digital Daily

83. BuzzMachine

84. comScore

85. Security Fix

86. CNN

87. Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

88. NewTeeVee

89. istartedsomething

90. Think Secret

91. ProBlogger Blog Tips

92. Reflections of a Newsosaur

93. GNUCITIZEN

94. O'Reilly Radar

95. MediaShift

96. ipodminusitunes

97. Doc Searls Weblog

98. Kotaku

99. Valleywag

100. Los Angeles Times

PS. This is a snapshot taken last night. The list is fairly volatile, according to Gabe, and will change quickly as stories move up and down the ladder at TechMeme.

PPS. The existence of this list will probably make getting stories on TechMeme even more highly valued than before, if this list is taken as gospel, as Technorati's was, even with its flaws and skews. There was no correlation, for example, between flow and rank, a site with very high flow could have very low rank on Technorati, if it didn't get many inbound pointers. It was just one measure, as TechMeme is just one measure.