Scripting News

The place on the Net for Flix

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:19:09 GMT

They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either.

AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections."

Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it.

Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill.

They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.

Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power!

Make the ~~users~~ everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.

How Hillary hit a nerve

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:31:01 GMT

She may or may not have been acting, but either way, when she sighed in New Hampshire and almost broke out in tears, and said how she feared that our country was heading from a bad place to a much worse place, she came close to expressing how many of us feel. Close but not quite there, because unlike the rest of us, she has a chance of being able to do something about it. The rest of us, Republican or Democrat, are going to have to sit by, and hope (there's Obama's word) that someone else can straighten out the mess, and really means it when they say that's what they want to do.

Meanwhile...

On Twitter, a reminder from Republican diehards from the south, of the supposed discourse we've had over the last five years.

"Cut and run."

"Micromanage."

It's all positioning, appealing to fear. Of course I don't want to cut and run. Nor do I want to micromanage.

Can we macromanage, or do we have to shut up and watch?

Our president used the term World War III, he actually spoke the words, as an optional American-started thing. This is the horror that makes us feel like HIllary did that day in New Hampshire.

In the sixties, the hardhats used to yell "America love it or leave it" to protestors. They had no clue about the country they were defending. Its strength is that you can love it, disagree with the people who run it, and not leave it. Even better, come Election Day, you can overthrow them, in a bloodless coup, and march down Pennsyvlania Avenue to celebrate. It's all right there in the Constitution. (But you don't get to hang the guy you overthrew.)

Watching the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, SC on Thurs night, the loutness of the Republicans was striking. First, the way they shouted down Ron Paul, who like HIllary, raised questions that most of us have. Why are we in Iraq? They laughed when he asked. Not only didn't any of them answer it, but none of them had the presence to realize that the majority of Americans who wonder the same thing might be offended by their laughter. I certainly was. When did dismissing an opinion you don't like become a proper response for someone seeking our vote? Any one of them could have said "I may not agree with Ron Paul, but please let him speak, and let him have our respect." Any of the others could have closed the deal in that moment. None of them had the guts to do it.

I also was struck by the gungho rhetoric about going to war with Iran. It was like one of those war movies where the young guys rush to sign up wanting to teach the Kaiser a lesson, or the Commies or whoever the demon du jour is. The movies almost always teach that war is hell, by the time the war is actually underway everyone wishes it were over. The way wars start is with spit and vinegar, vim and vigor, talk of pride and honor, but they quickly devolve to misery, futility, death, devastation. My generation learned that early-on, with Vietnam. I don't remember anyone thinking we should be there. I missed being drafted by luck. I thought for sure that my generation would never choose to go to war. I was wrong. But I didn't imagine that, after creating such a quagmire in Iraq, which we still haven't extracted ourselves from, we would be so quick to conjure up another futile war.

War with Iran is a crazy, crazy idea. All evidence is that Iran has actually been trying to work with us since 9/11. Even if they weren't, as Ron Paul says, they're a third world country, no threat to us. That the Republicans would contemplate war with Iran, with such colorful gunghoisms (gates of hell, introduce them to their virgins), this is where HIllary hit the nerve. Could we be in for another four years of lunacy? Will those who object be called unpatriotic?

Could a Republican actually win this year? Who thought Bush could actually be re-elected at this time in 2004?

I heard on one of the Sunday talk shows that the reason Republicans don't like Ron Paul is they think he's anti-American. I've listened to him, if you take him at face-value, which I do, his ideas seem radical, unimplementable, but un-American? He's fervently pro-American. He says we should fix our own house, it's falling apart, instead of trying to control others (which doesn't work). How would we feel if our country were occupied by foreign troops? Would we do everything we can to expel them? (Of course.) Why should we expect any other country to be different? I've been saying the same thing since our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ron Paul has the guts to say the madness is mad. He's the only one in either party who does that, though Obama comes close, and in her New Hampshire moment Hillary did too.

I want someone to win my vote by telling me how good I am, not how bad the other guy is. I see through it, I know the Dems don't want to micromanage, they don't wake up in the morning looking for ways to lose. I know they're not cowards. All this sloganeering has done is make us weary of ourselves. I want to get started fixing things, if not now -- when? That's the nerve that Hillary hit.

Political links

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:11:05 GMT

Salon: "What Huckabee has lacked is a top-level adviser to layer some intellectual heft and policy realism onto the candidate's make-it-up-every-morning improvisational style."

NY Times: "The Democratic presidential primary in New York on Feb 5 is shaping up as the state's most competitive since 1992."

Amazon SimpleDB followup

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:10:33 GMT

I spent a few days over the last week trying to get a connection between Frontier and Amazon's SimpleDB.

I got connections going with: CreateDomain, DeleteDomain, ListDomains. They all use the same basic code to handle authentication, and all three work.

But I hit a dead-end with the PutAttributes call. At first I thought I had found a problem on their end, because their JavaScript scratchpad app (a life-saver) had exactly the same problem as my code. I got in touch with the Amazon people, they asked me to download a new version of the scratchpad app, and it worked, but of course my app still doesn't. I compared my parameter list to theirs, and except for the signature and time-stamp they are identical. So there's something wrong with my code, clearly.

Here's a link to a plain text listing of the code. All four of the interface routines use this code to call the Amazon web service. This is the place the problem almost certainly is.

And here's the interface for PutAttributes.

As often happens, the geeky readers of this blog may spot the mistake that I don't, so all suggestions are welcome. I really want to get past this and start building applications that connect with this new web service.

Update: Problem solved? I got an email from my contact at Amazon, he suggested maybe I wasn't sorting the parameters before generating the signature. I checked, he was right. At one point I had been sorting them, but in an attempt to solve another problem, took a different approach which left the parameters not-sorted. Had I taken another look at the docs I would have seen that the params must be sorted before generating the signature. When I re-coded it so that they were sorted, PutAttributes worked! Heh. So now I have to do some more testing to be sure I really have the answer, but it looks pretty good.

The debate about the worth of podcasting

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:44:27 GMT

There's a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, but it's framed this way --> if you can't get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.

I'm having a slow Friday so far, it's cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we're in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are wrong.

Let me explain.

My phone doesn't have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast.

Meanwhile...

There's another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people's ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.

The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.

A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do.

Same with podcasting.

I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I'm contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It's not why I podcast.

We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there's lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don't know, it's not my problem. But let's be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional's ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.

Now I'm going to try to get some work done.

Bob Stepno: "Podcasting lets people sing to each other again."

See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.

What if you had a $300,000 hole in your pocket?

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:55:22 GMT

Chris Brogan asks a question...

What if you had $300K to spend on a luxury, an impulse buy, not something you need, what would you spend it on?

I just answered -- I'd buy 30 full-page ads in the NY Times.

What would you buy?

FlickrFan update

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:10:15 GMT

I can see from the public list that a number of FlickrFans aren't updating. The most recent version is 0.41.

If you want to get current, click on this link on the machine the software is running on:

http://127.0.0.1:5337/photofan/updateNow

If there are subsequent problems, please post a comment here.

Still diggin!

Worth watching every so often

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:23:00 GMT

What if our political process became conscious?

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:44:19 GMT

I think something pretty amazing may be happening with our political process that mirrors what's happening on the Internet, in the blogosphere. I've been talking about it on and off since the Howard Dean candidacy in 2003, which I think most people misread or misunderstood, seeing it only in the existing context of how it can be used to make a candidate more competitive in raising money to buy ads to run on TV. Perhaps that's what was going on from the candidates' point of view, but it was not what was going on from our side of the tube. What was happening was we were flexing our political muscles using a new tool for organizing, the Internet. We were waking up, saying Hello World to the candidates. One of them heard us, Dean, although he misunderstood what we were saying.

It's as if we, collectively were tapping a microphone and tentatively asking "Is this thing on?"

Anyway...

Let's summarize what's happened so far in the 2008 political process.

1. We had a long run-up of a year or so, with candidate debates, lots of punditry, two front-runners, one in each party, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

2. The Democrats outraised the Republicans for the first time in a long time. Obama actually raised more money than Clinton did.

3. Huckabee, a candidate who raised little money, and who was never considered a front-runner, won the Iowa caucus on the Republican side. Money didn't choose the winner in Iowa for the Republicans.

4. McCain, a candidate who in the end spent very little money and had almost no organization, who had long since been forgotten as a front-runner, won the Republican primary in New Hampshire. Again, money didn't choose the winner in NH for the Republicans.

Now, in the aftermath of New Hampshire, the pundits on TV, most notoriously Chris Matthews on MSNBC, are quickly snapping back with new crazy theories on why what happened happened, but we shouldn't believe them or pay much attention, because they don't see what's happening in the electorate. Neither does Clinton, but the Republicans may be beginning to get a clue (and Clinton will soon too).

My belief: The electorate is waking up. Maybe it's just my hope speaking. Can't tell yet.

The electorate doesn't need messages, just as Doc says there is no demand for messages. What the electorate needs is to hire someone to lead us for the four years between elections. It needs someone who will ground our collective behavior in something resembling reality, so we deal with the problems that are collectively in front of us: 1. The honor and prestige of our country (the equivalent of goodwill for companies, settle the wars we started, accept that we have to protect against terrorism, stop hyping it in terms of conventional warfare, that's insulting). 2. The integrity of our homes (everything from disaster response to changing behavior on a global level to respond to global warming). 3. Caring for ourselves (health, education, protecting the Constitution).

We've gone crazy in the last seven years. The 2004 election was amazingly crazy. The candidates appeared to be running for President of Iraq, that's all they talked about, what was good for the people of Iraq. The lunacy of the electorate is that we didn't throw it back in their faces saying "Let us know when you have something to say about the USA."

We need to communicate with each other and with the pols and pundits without going through the polling process. When they quote blogs on TV they're quoting people who used to be print columnists who now publish on the Internet. That changes nothing.

I'm not expecting very much from people who live "Inside the Beltway." I don't live there, never have, don't even like visiting the place. To me it's much like the arrogance of Silicon Valley. You can't pop out every four years get us to vote for you and then go back into your nest. Politics belongs to all of us, in this country, the people are the government. We really lost our way, now it's time to come back. It's the change that's happening in everything, decentralization, disintermediation. Obama speaks of a plurality, his campaign isn't about a mere election, it's about changing the way we do things.

My advice to candidates going back to Dean was and is to start implementing the change you seek before the election, while you have the full attention of the electorate. Ask us to give money, not to buy ads, but to buy health insurance for 50,000 uninsured people in a particular state, so we can see how powerful we are collectively, how we can do good, starting right now. We yearn for this, to feel our muscles flex collectively, and individually to make a difference, not just in your hype, but in real terms. Hillary Clinton could have gotten up yesterday and said "There's no time to waste. We can't wait until January 2009 to solve the problems. Let's start right now."

Maybe she won't get elected, but getting us organized now would make it more likely.

JFK: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

See how that works??

Ten red pens

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:35:48 GMT

I ordered ten red pens but they sent ten dozen. Oy.

Today's links

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:23:21 GMT

Flickr: My election return desktop.

Brian Bailey: Bloomberg wins New Hampshire.

Newsgator's RSS products are free now.

Podcasting News: Podcasting comes to TiVo.

Glued to the TV

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:01:27 GMT

For the last 24 hours or so I've been glued to the TV, watching MSNBC, Fox and CNN, listening to the pundits and campaign flacks, reading various articles on the web, and thinking a lot about what is happening. I'm glad I'm not at CES or in New Hampshire, I didn't want to miss this process, as I did in 2000 when I was in Europe during Iowa and New Hampshire, another period of a couple of weeks when things changed a lot.

At this point there's absolutely no doubt that the candidacy of Barack Obama is a movement. Whether it's like Martin Luther King or JFK, I can't say -- I am not old enough to remember those (I remember their deaths, but nothing else about them).

So if it's a movement, what is it about?

I think it's this -- there are a lot of Democrats and independents and even quite a few Republicans who feel that the Bush II presidency has been a disaster because of the war we started, the incompetent response to Katrina, the trampling of the Constitution, the cynicism, secrecy and arrogance of the government.

But it's not fair to just blame the Republicans, the Democrats must be punished too -- for their complicity. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards voted for the resolution authorizing the war. Neither of them spoke out against it as we were going to war. I do remember those times, and had they spoken out they would have been crucified, but when you're running for President that doesn't excuse you. While many of us didn't stand up and object either, we now have to choose someone to lead us, and we're not going with someone who compromised when it came to our national honor (the war), our homes (Katrina), and the integrity of our political system (the Constitution).

In a normal year, the Edwards plea to fight special interests would be welcome and enough, even radical, but in 2008 it is not radical enough. True, the war was started because both parties are owned by the defense industry, Edwards claims he doesn't receive their money, implying that Clinton does (and Obama?). The hypocrisy of Support the Troops really translates into Pay off the Defense Contractors. We must place part of the blame for the Iraq debacle on the defense contractors, who fund all our politicians, of both parties.

So Obama may not in fact be the leader we're looking for, but the voters of New Hampshire and Iowa have annointed him anyway. He may have waffled on whether he would have voted to support the war, but it may have been, as he says, not wanting to make trouble for Kerry and Edwards in 2004. He may have received money from the defense industry, if so, that had better stop right now.

Obama, like Carter in 1976, may be our pennance for having re-elected Bush in 2004. We're taking the medicine we deserve for having been crazy enough to re-elect someone who was so bad for us. The only president of the past even remotely in Bush's league was Nixon, who we followed with a smiling preacher who didn't accept the ways of Washington. We didn't like him either, it turns out.

Obama is also, apparently, the medicine that the 20-somethings are forcing the elders to take. I confessed to a friend that my discomfort with Obama comes not only from not trusting his record, but also what it says about me. If elected, he will be the first President who is younger than I am. Thus begins yet another step in the long decline. As I said the other day, our choice of president is someone who most closely validates our view of ourselves relative to the country and the world. Obama is dissonant to me, because in my mind, the President is older than me. Maybe not any more.

We could do worse, much. And maybe those who say that Obama is easy prey for Karl Rove and his brothers, lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone to work for, are right. Maybe for that reason those of us who will vote Democratic this time should hope for McCain over Romney or Giuliani. It's hard to imagine McCain using the tactics of the Swift Boaters, but hard to imagine the others not using them. Huckabee? Interestingly he says the Republicans shouldn't be so quick to attack Obama, because he represents something good about the people. That is a refreshing idea -- a political leader focusing on the wants of the people. I still think Huckabee may be the first DIY candidate, the first one who embraces the 21st Century VRM model for co-existing with your customers (pols call it their "base.") Even Obama isn't so eloquent about the people.

This week things are changing. Things were pretty bad before, so change must be good, right??

New FlickrFan feature

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:17:56 GMT

1. Be sure the OPML app is running.

2. Update to get version 0.40 of FlickrFan.

3. Now, when you upload a picture using the drop folder a web page will display with HTML text that you can copy/paste into a blog post or other web page. Screen shot.

4. You can disable this feature on the Drop Folder prefs page. Screen shot.

If you have any questions please post a comment here.

Why Yahoo should buy or merge with a TV network

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:26:02 GMT

As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that.

We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first.

BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.

Why it's the last possible moment for Netflix to open up

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:31:25 GMT

Comcast announced a service at CES that sounds an awful lot like Netflix. I already pay Comcast over $100 a month for various services. I pay Netflix $20 per month, and what Comcast is proposing is even more useful and easier than what Netflix offers. If it actually is, it would be easier to turn off the Netflix service.

Netflix has a unique opportunity with X years of preference data for users that they still have active relationships with. Open the service up so that other websites can integrate their services with yours, the prototype being a dating site that matched people with others who like the same kinds of movies. Build a network of utility to lock users in with a feather instead of a deadbolt.

The uniqueness of Netflix is about to go poof. Time to build a new kind of uniqueness. It might be too late, but let's hope it's not. I don't really expect Comcast to share data with other service providers. It's not in their nature. Netflix -- zig while they match your (old) zag.

Jimmy Carter in 1976

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:16:17 GMT

Scott's next book

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:54:47 GMT

Berkeley neighbor Scott Rosenberg announced yesterday that he has a contract now for a book on the story of blogging. I've known he wanted to work in this area for a while, now I'm glad he's got a publisher and a contract. I have no doubts it will be a great book, and a foundation for future work.

Future-safe archives in the Guardian

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:46:05 GMT

Charles Arthur: "You can meet Major Olmsted in death as you could in life. The blog, and his site, is still there."

CESgram

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:41:14 GMT

Scoble checks in via Twittergram from CES.

Prefs for Flickr desktop upload drop folder

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:08:57 GMT

This morning a new feature for FlickrFan users.

When you drop a picture into the desktop "drop folder" it's automatically uploaded to your Flickr account. Now you can set preferences for tags, the default description, access controls and content categories.

Change Note #24: Upload defaults.