Scripting News

The small picture

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:38:41 GMT

Why is it that the highest-rated sites, some with supposedly hundreds of thousands of subscribers, only generate a couple hundred hits when they link to you?

As Pete Cashmore on Mashable says, it's because the subscriber numbers don't reflect actual readership. The people who subscribed may not even be aware that they are subscribed. Or put another way, we haven't learned yet how to measure what's valuable, we only have the crudest ways to measure value, so crude as to be meaningless.

Ultimately what matters to me is not how many people subscribe to my feed, rather how much of a connection I can make with the people I want to connect with. I'm satisfied that the people I care about read my site, and the aggregators flow mostly the wrong people through my posts with the most sensational headlines, ignoring the ones with the greatest value, imho.

I'm a blogger not a broadcaster. Blogging isn't about mass markets, it's about the small picture. My small picture (and for you, yours). I'm trying to draw a picture, create a frame of reference that's personal, not corporate. I'm a zig to corporate media's zag. I am a blogger. I am personal.

I don't want a hundred thousand ghosts "subscribing" to my feed. I want to influence the thinkers of the tech sphere, and I'm satisfied that I do. No leaderboard is ever going to reflect that, even though my site is often favorably rated by them.

I want rating services to provide clues about what I should be subscribing to. I want them to find not what's popular with the masses but what will be valuable to me. My favorite movies are not the ones the masses like, I prefer art films and ultra-violent comedies (I like everything Quentin Taratino does, for example).

It's a simple matter to apply collaborative filtering to this problem, we've even done it in SYO. These ideas need revisiting now that everyone else seems to have caught on that this is a problem worth solving.

Fred Wilson: "I totally agree about engagement being the right metric."

Photo set: Berkeley Hills, sunny after rain

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:48:14 GMT

Instead of using my iPhone and Twittergram to post real-time pictures, I used the Nikon and took higher resolution pictures.

The leaves are turning, and the sun was out after a huge rain. I thought there would be some good pictures, and there were.

Click on the picture above to see the set.

My iPhone stopped ringing

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:27:14 GMT

Sometime after I updated to 1.1.1 my iPhone stopped ringing. I checked myself, calling my iPhone using my Blackberry. Sure enough, no ring. I did a soft restart (hold the button on top down while clicking the menu button on the bottom). Didn't help. Did a search, found I'm not the first with this problem. Dr Fran says she missed a social event because her iPhone didn't ring. I missed a bunch of important calls before I realized my phone wasn't ringing anymore. This is the nightmare, I can't afford to be without the phone, but a phone that doesn't ring is like 1/4 a real phone. Oy. Let me know if you have any ideas. I don't relish getting in Apple's loop on this.

Update: Ben had the answer. Yehi!! The phone rings again. Happy.

Rainy day over the bay

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:22:34 GMT

New home page

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:15:56 GMT

The home page on Scripting News has changed to match the RSS feed. Now the 20 most recent items are posted, as opposed to just the items of the current day. The current day's items are expanded, the previous days' items are collapsed. You can toggle the expand-collapse state by clicking on the plus or minus to the left of the title. As always, the blue arrows are the permalinks, if you're going to point to an article, you should use the page it points to. This is an experiment, it's possible that the expand-collapse approach doesn't work in all browsers. Report any problems here. Hope you like!

Saving the h-word

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:33:25 GMT

Usually I ignore the moralistic snipes that come from a handful of bloggers, but to characterize a post of mine with a term like "hate" is really over the top. The post certainly was critical of a piece of software, but hate is a special word, and should be saved for special circumstances.

My family emigrated to the U.S. during World War II from fascist-occupied Europe. Growing up, my grandparents told us stories of how they fled for their lives and how the U.S. welcomed us. Without that, I wouldn't be here today, I never would have been born, because my parents and grandparents wouldn't have survived. What they dealt with certainly was hate. It was there in NY when I was told by schoolmates that their uncles were killed in World War II fighting for "The Jews." To be blamed for the deaths of loved ones when I wasn't even born was, imho, an example of hate.

Saying that a software system is controlling its users, when it obviously is, is not hate. It's criticism, and it's one of the things guaranteed by our Constitution in the United States. In this country hate speech does not enjoy the same protection. So let's not cross that line so easily. Let's not devalue a term like hate, let's save it for those special circumstances when speech is used to persecute innocent people.

PS: I turned on the TechMeme blocker to be sure this post doesn't appear there. I don't want this to turn into a topic that other people pile onto in hope of improving their rank on the Leaderboard. I'm seriously considering leaving the flag on, because the atmosphere there has turned so acrid.

Good morning everybody

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:06:37 GMT

Working on code today, may be limited updates.

nytimesriver.com fix

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:11:58 GMT

The nytimesriver.com site is the perfect way to read news on a mobile web browser, on a Blackberry, iPhone or Nokia N95, as examples. The home page of the site is a stream of new stories, in reverse chronologic order, with titles, links and descriptions.

Until today the links went to printer-friendly versions of articles, now they point to mobile versions, with ads on them, so they make a bit of money for the Times. This was the first concrete result of my meeting with the Times tech guys on Thursday in New York.

http://nytimesriver.com/

Here's an example of a mobile Times story.

Bug fixed in Flickr-to-Twitter code?

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 18:54:18 GMT

There was definitely a bug in the code that processed Flickr categories in Twittergram. If you'd specify that a picture required a tag, and one of the pictures didn't have it, all the other new pictures would be ignored, whether they had the tag or not.

Some people who used the category tagging feature didn't notice this problem because they never uploaded pictures without the tags.

If you never used tags and had it set up to not require them, everything would work as planned (that's how I use it).

In any case, knock wood, the bug should now be fixed and all users should be happy whether they never use tags, always use tags, or sometimes do and sometimes don't.

Thanks to everyone who patiently and carefully reported bugs, esp MDY whose bug report helped me zero in on the errant code. If you want to report further problems, or just say that it's fixed, please post a comment here. Twitter is notoriously bad for bug reporting, since user's reports, even in the best circumstances, often leave out important information. With the 140 character limit, it's impossible to fully describe a problem. That's one thing Twitter is not good for.

Why Facebook sucks

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:25:35 GMT

Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why.

It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do.

Why exactly do I need Facebook to get inbetween me and my address book?

I mean, I understand why they want me to tell them everyone I know, but how about letting me download a copy to my computer, so I can back it up, use it on my iPhone or Blackberry, bequeath it to my heirs, write a book about it, or give a copy to Google or Netflix or Yahoo, or you get the idea.

It's the last thing they don't want me to do, give a copy to a competitor of theirs. And they hope I won't notice that I'm doing all this work and not insisting on at least being their equal when it comes to my data.

Sometime in November Google is rumored to be revealing their answer to Facebook. Whatever it is it will surely have an API, and will allow Google apps to share the info, and it will, if it hopes to compete with Facebook, provide some access to this data to app developers. But the true measure of their gravitas will be whether they give full control of the user's data to the user. If they do that, no matter what's missing from their software, it won't suck.

PS: When I write about it, I do it crudely, saying they suck or don't. When Doc Searls writes about it he calls it Vendor Relationship Management. Doc writes so elegantly because he is a research fellow at Harvard University.

Twitter Pro?

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:00:00 GMT

A thread was started by Scoble who suggested, in a phone talk yesterday, that he would pay $10 a month for a Twitter that didn't have the 140 character limit. Seemed like an excellent conversation starter, so I relayed the idea via email to Fred Wilson, cc'd to Scoble.

While I was at breakfast in Palo Alto the two went back and forth, and the idea that always creeps into conversations about Twitter crept into this one. What about SMS? I guess SMS users are limited to 140 characters? Don't know.

After I posted a pic of pumping gas on my way back to Berkeley, Scoble called me on my cell phone, which is beautifully integrated via Bluetooth with my car's sound system (to him it sounded like I was at home, not driving on the freeway), and we discussed many things including this conversation which led me to another sequence of ideas.

1. I wonder if anyone reads my twits on SMS. (I sort of doubt it, many of them have links which would be useless on SMS.)

2. If they do, I don't care if there are parts of my twits that don't translate (after all, they're already living with that).

3. And if I had to check a box saying that my twits wouldn't be available on SMS at all, I'd happily check it. I really only care about the web, and if your cell phone can't do the web, well, get another cell phone. I've always written software for the highest common denominator not the lowest, why should my micro-blogging platform be any different.

After hanging up I wanted to re-iterate -- give me payloads for Twitter so we can go where we need to go. Pictures are a very easy and vital way to express what you're doing right now. And lots of cell phones (like mine) can do nice lo-rez pics. I want payloads.

Update: Fred Wilson himself follows me in SMS. Rex Hammock too.

Now that I'm home

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:25:14 GMT

I have to tell Virgin America that I'm not going to be on the flight tomorrow morning. That's proving more difficult than you might imagine. I logged into my account on their website, and it seems to have forgotten about my reservation, even though I just got an email reminding me to check in. Okay, so I called their reservation line, navigated through voicemail, and received a message that due to heavy call volume they can't talk to me, and hung up! Oh man, that's not cool.

So what should I do now? I thought maybe I should call Xeni or Cory or Peter, since I know all of them and they're now spokespersons for the airline. Heh. Okay I'm not going to do that. But I thought about it for a second or two and decided to just blog it instead.

Now I have to talk to American Airlines to see about getting them to pay for the hotel in Dallas last night. Lotsa luck! (Predictably, they said I didn't read the fine print, so I paid for my hotel room and that's that. Now what to do with all the miles I have on this airline that I'm never going to use.)

One more stop -- Expedia, to see if I can get a refund for two nights in New York that I didn't use. What do you think?? Hmmm. Well, Expedia wins the prize! I'm getting the refund. I asked where she was -- the Philippines. I congratulated her for working for a good company, that made her quite happy. I make a point of thanking these poor people when they help me.

I'm pretty sure I'll get a credit from Virgin America when they actually decide to talk to me, or when the website recognizes me, whichever comes first.

Later: I did get through to Virgin America, they gave me a credit for the unused portion of the trip, which I can apply to a trip anytime in the next year. A good outcome.

The face of Uncov

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:55:21 GMT

Click the pic to read about the man behind Uncov.

Early morning twits

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:47:57 GMT

Someday every story in the NYT will be blogged thoroughly before it runs.

Lane Hartwell loves what she do. (32)

If Fred Wilson feels like chopped liver, I must be liver spots. (63)

Okay it was overly optimistic of me to set my computer's clock to pacific time. (79)

Scott Beale says the next disaster will be twittered. It was. (62)

Mike Arrington is at his best when angry. (41)

NYT OPML. (10)

American Airlines are mother fcukers. (37)

Techmeme is still a spam-filled cesspool. (41)

After twitting and blogging about chopped liver, now i have a jones for chopped liver, at 4:06AM. Oh the humanity. (114)

PS: All are less than 140 chars. (32)

Improvements to twittergram.com/picstream

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:41:56 GMT

While waiting for airport security to open at DFW, I made a few small improvements to the picstream page.

1. If a picture is wider than 500 pixels, scale it.

2. Only the 100 most recent pics are shown.

3. They have numbers next to them.

http://www.twittergram.com/picstream

Jack-in to CNN while eating breakfast

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:00:50 GMT

Visit at the NY Times

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:24:25 GMT

Today I had a visit at the NY Times with a couple of tech guys, got a tour of the newsroom and now have a fairly good idea of what's available on the Times site these days and got some pointers of places to look for interesting possibilities.

One of the intriguing spots was this blog...

http://open.nytimes.com/

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/rss2.xml

"A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers."

This is something new.

"All the code that's fit to printf."

I had noticed that the Times has some pretty rich metadata. Do a View Source on any story. Wouldn't it be cool if that data were included in their RSS 2.0 feed? The category element is designed for exactly that kind of data. And I wondered if there is a master taxonomy somewhere. I'd love to see it.

Anyway, this is just the beginning of a conversation. Derek and Jacob have their hearts in our world, and even though the Times still feels as if it's "over there." Perhaps someday it may not feel so far away.

American Airlines ripoff

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:23:52 GMT

No two ways about it, American Airlines ripped me off.

The facts. My flight from Newark to Dallas was delayed by bad weather.

We were 1/2 hour late getting into Dallas. I only had 45 minutes to make the connection if we were on time, so I just had 15 minutes. I got to the gate for my SF flight with five minutes to spare. But the doors were closed, and they had given my seat away.

Now, in their computer, they knew I was coming. Why did they give my seat away? I guess they were betting that I wouldn't make it. Seems they could have told me that before I pushed it to get there with 5 minutes to spare.

Then the guy behind the counter told me I could standby on the next flight, in three hours. No guarantee I'd get a seat. I have a lot of miles on American. I choose to fly American because they treat me well, probably because of all the miles. But it's at times like this, when they treat me like garbage, that I see how it really works. Rather than take the chance of flying with an empty seat, they gave my seat to someone else.

I went down to the Admirals Club and called their 800 number and was treated well, but I knew I couldn't make a seat appear tonight. I'm staying in Dallas tonight, paying for it myself (they wouldn't pay), they got me on the first flight to SFO tomorrow morning. Not standing by.

But it doesn't change the fact that they gave my seat away while they knew I was trying to get to the gate, and I was only late because their flight was late. Miles or no miles, I think my good feelings for American are finally gone (it's not the first time I was told to go to hell by the airline, btw).

New York's Finest (and friends)

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:22:13 GMT

Click on the pic for detail.

Today's links

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:06:12 GMT

Pizza, salad and spaghetti with Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio at John's Pizzeria, 260 W 44th.

Adam Engst: "My initial reaction to Twitter was that it was utterly inane, but I was basing my opinion on the public timeline that show posts from all Twitter users and on the Twittervision service that plots messages from Twitter users on a map of the world."