Scripting News

A flashconf on fair use?

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:29:57 GMT

There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.

It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."

The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down.

Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion.

I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.

I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry?

There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.

So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks.

I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas.

Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference.

What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??

How spam will likely enter the Twitter community

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:12:30 GMT

I think I know how spammers are going to enter the Twitter world. It'll come in the form of replies, which basically function like email. You can direct a message with a url to anyone as long as you know their username.

Here's a screen shot that illustrates spam being sent to a hypothetical user. I didn't send it of course.

Another problem, the destination of the url is likely masked through the use of a shortener so the user could be clicking through to some really nasty place, with no way of knowing in advance that's where they're going. (Such messages probably wouldn't alert you in advance that they're about meds or poker or sex.)

The press and bloggers will run stories saying "Spam Comes to Twitter" and they'll be right, even though it won't be the main part of Twitter. Users will expect the company to do something about it, but I don't see what they can do other than eliminate the feature. Users will certainly want the ability to completely opt-out of replies.

PS: I received direct messages saying that the JetBlue account is spam (screen shot), but it is not spam, it's commercial information. Big diff. I would have to opt-in to see these messages in my stream. And if I got tired of it, I could opt-out. Spam is stuff that intrudes that you can't easily turn off.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of blogging

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:45:20 GMT

Here's a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News.

Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs.

I hope this isn't too confusing!

"cheesecake"

PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they seem to be able to copy each other, so mistakes propogate.

We've made so many accomplishments, both before and after the coining of the term, Karp for example starts with VIgnette. In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn't have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn't believed.)

They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. Jorn Barger used my software to do his "web log" -- why isn't that part of the story? Well it isn't if all you think is important is the choosing of the name.

Scripting News is 10.71110623 years old today

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:29:07 GMT

Here's a formula that calculates how many years old Scripting News is on any given day.

double (clock.now () - date ("4/1/97")) / (60*60*24*365.25)

The answer is: 10.71110623.

It counts the number of days since its inception and divides by the number of days in a year. It accounts for leap years, assuming there is an extra 0.25 days each year.

Bathtime in Clerkenwell

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:55:57 GMT

Click the pic to play.

Okay let's get viral!

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:04:28 GMT

Fred Wilson did it, I had to do it tooooo.

In NYC, the Second Ave Deli is coming back

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:22:55 GMT

Ed Levine writes a remembrance of the newest deli to open in NYC, with the same cast and food, at a new location, uptown (on 33rd St) and not on Second Ave.

New York sighs in relief. So does every deli fan in the rest of the U.S. and the world.

That seals it. I'm headed back to NYC before the end of the year.

PS: A funny thing happened when I entered Second Avenue Deli into Google Maps.

Amazon removes the database scaling wall

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:13:40 GMT

When Amazon introduced S3 in March 2006 I knew I would use it and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet.

I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here.

When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.)

As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue.

A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.)

Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there were a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem.

If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task for Manila, but it would have made it economically possible.

Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.

Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.

They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply).

Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.

Twitter takes a break, we're awake, and wondering...

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:59:25 GMT

There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble.

What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time?

What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps working.

Same with the phone network. Imagine if all the cell phones and land lines went down for scheduled maintenence for 12 hours. Again, it's unthinkable.

Even when there's a good excuse like a big snowstorm in the east, when the airline system goes down for 12 hours, a lot of people are upset, and it never happens as a scheduled thing.

If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.

Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step.

Explain to us what these long outages are for. I can take a guess -- something about the database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.

Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally. If so, I'd like to know.

Meanwhile it's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet, one that does exactly what Twitter does, and runs all its applications.

I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space to compete with Twitter.

Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.

It can only mean one thing

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:05:33 GMT

My black MacBook, purchased in May of last year, a day after the product was announced and a day after the computer it replaced, a white G4 iBook, died -- died itself earlier today. There was an evil clicking sound coming from the back. The spinning rainbow cursor. Reboot it to see a disk with a flashing question mark.

The death of the black MacBook can only mean that there's a new sexy Apple laptop coming soon. Somewhere between a fat version of the iPhone and a Sony Vaio. Hope it has a real keyboard, not a virtual one.

Amazon's database

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:00:20 GMT

A note from Jeff Barr that Amazon has announced the database companion to S3.

No doubt I'm going to use it.

I signed up. It's not open yet.

U.S. Blues

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:40:51 GMT

I'm Uncle Sam/that's who I am
Been hidin' out/in a rock and roll band
Shake the hand that shook the hand
Of P.T. Barnum/and Charlie Chan

Glad to be back home in the good ole U.S. of A.

Best wishes to Scoble

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:51:55 GMT

I was in the audience yesterday when the one dramatic moment of the conference took place. Scoble was on stage. Mike Arrington was sitting to my right in the front row of the second section (on the right). Mike showed me a piece he was writing, and I gulped. It said Scoble was leaving Podtech and probably going to FastCompany to start a TV network for them. Since Scoble is my friend, I knew that there was some truth to this, but was disappointed to see it was coming out, esp at a moment when Scoble wouldn't have a moment to think and consult with friends before formulating a response. HIs laptop screen was being projected as we watched him edit his comment on TechCrunch. At one point Mike asked if I thought he knew we could see what he was typing. I didn't think he did.

Anyway, Scoble lets it all hang out. And somehow he gets away with it. What would kill most people just stings him, and he smiles through it all, in his bumbling Scoble-like way, and it always amazes me how he makes lemonade out of the lemons. This isn't the optimal way to announce you're leaving a company, and his deal with FC isn't final yet. But somehow I think he'll navigate this transition and come out in a better place after the dust settles.

Bebo has the right idea

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:25:26 GMT

I don't know what Bebo is, I guess it's a social network, they say it's #3 in the USA, #1 in the UK, but they just did something that's pretty likely to work, if it's technically possible. They're cloning Facebook so that their service will run Facebook apps. What this means, if they can pull it off, is that they won't have to fight to get support from developers. That's a big deal.

Google could have done this with OpenSocial. Watching the panel assembled by Marc Canter at LeWeb3, I was reminded of every tech conference I've been to for almost 30 years. Some big company sitting in the center, and lots of smaller ones sucking up to them, not daring to say what's obvious, that the big company is only interested in limiting the growth of an upstart (not present on stage of course). That's where the Fear comes in Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. We don't say anything because we're too scared to. Even the outspoken Marc Canter, who's smart and has been around this block many times, doesn't dare say what's obvious.

Now Bebo decides to get in lockstep with Facebook, not Google. Of course! Facebook has the juice. But this is a dangerous place to be if Facebook doesn't want them there, and being a big company, they probably don't. The only value of having clones to FB is that it negates the threat from Google. Sometimes having clones is a good thing, but usually the clones take over the market. Witness MSIE and Netscape, and then Firefox. Compaq et al and IBM. dBASE and Fox. It's possible to depose an installed leader if it's possible to clone them. As a user and developer, I'd like to see FB be open to cloning. If I were a FB shareholder I'm not so sure.

One constituency that's sure to like the existence of clones are Facebook developers. Without choice in platform vendors, they have nowhere to go when the sole vendor decides to take over their market. With a viable alternative, unless FB is incredibly aggressive and builds its competitive features so they can run on competitive platforms, at least developers will have a place to run their apps when FB encroaches.

Platforms are a game, like Risk, with rules and strategies. Google did not play the game wisely with OpenSocial. I chalk this up to inexperience on the part of the strategists. So far Facebook has been doing what's needed to keep its dominant position. Bebo deciding to clone the Facebook API ratifies that position, it's a gutsy move, but the best one available to them, and to other would-be Facebook competitors.

PS: The news is slow to reach Europe. Facebook said yesterday that they support what Bebo is doing. Very enthusiastically. That should be the end of OpenSocial.

Why I use Twitter

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:10:43 GMT

I use it because it helps me keep in touch with people I want to be in touch with, without taking very much time. It serves a function that the links on Scripting News used to serve, but that was just a one-way thing. Now I get links and ideas from other people. It's an equalizer, a playing field leveler. It's useful the same way a cell phone is useful. Sure some conversations on cell phones might seem dull. So hang up. But don't get rid of the phone (and certainly don't make general statements about phones based on some people's conversations).

Arc de Triomphe

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:03:38 GMT

As the cab was heading back to my hotel it turned down an avenue and there was the Arc. I grabbed the camera and got a movie as we approached the circle around it.

Future-safe archives, day 2

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:13:20 GMT

Phil Wolff on things for bloggers to do before they die.

Was TechMeme hacked?

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:32:24 GMT

Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.

Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control.

Happy to be using a Mac.

PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.

Future-safe archives

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:34:02 GMT

I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.

I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started.

First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence.

Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.

None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever.

Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing.

People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should!

With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on?

And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.

And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff.

Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done?

PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.

Tonight's speakers dinner

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:09:17 GMT

In Paris, we're ready to go to bed (it's still just 2PM in Calif) and I have some pics from tonight's speakers dinner.

Delia Cohen of Pangea Day and the TED conference.

Doc Searls and Erik Stuart (eBay).

Henri Asseily, founder of Shopzilla.

Doc Searls shooting a picture of me.

Marc Canter and Loic Le Meur.