Scripting News

The crazy baseball fan rule

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:09:08 GMT

Every so often a beer-drunk fan will run on the field during a baseball game causing a delay while the cops chase him down. Back in the days of streaking sometimes these fans would run out on the field naked.

You'll never see one of these scenes on TV because there's a rule that the broadcasters are not allowed to follow the drunk baseball fan onto the field. If they were to broadcast the drunk fan, the theory goes, that would just encourage more people to do it, meaning more delayed games, annoyed players, offended fans and busted streakers.

It seems to me this very simple rule should be adopted by news networks when it comes to the most hideous attack ads.

Example. The North Carolina Republican Party has yet to spend a dime running a racist attack ad against Obama, one that McCain and the national party swear they don't want them to run. But millions of TV viewers have seen the ad, repeatedly, run for free on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. This seems grossly unfair, and how does it not count as a campaign contribution?

We've seen this before, Bush swore that the swiftboat ads that questioned John Kerry's honor and patriotism were unfair and he didn't want them run, but they helped him anyway, and somehow I doubt his sincerity as I doubt McCain's. But you can't really blame them, in this age many candidates believe they must do whatever they have to do, no matter how immoral or unethical, to get elected. In the analogy, they'll always run onto the field, naked if they have to, to get past the competition.

But why should we tolerate the news organizations giving free air time to the campaigns? Aren't they making an illegal campaign contribution when they run a Republican attack ad without giving equal time to Democratic attack ads?

Maybe they could invoke their integrity (as they so often do when it suits them) for the good of the electoral process and force the attackers to pay for the air time? And maybe if they weren't granted so much free air time, seemingly in proportion to their ugliness, perhaps fewer of them would even be produced.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

What to do about Rev Wright

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:55:04 GMT

Rev Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers, an interview that will air tomorrow and will certainly restart the pundit-mania over all things Wright and what it supposedly means.

I've watched some of the sermons that are excerpted, in their entirety, and in every case the soundbites do not express his meaning. In every case I found the Wright sermons not only fair and American but compelling. As much as any Christian sermon I've heard, more so than most.

I also understand that black churches are different from white churches. I don't go to either, never have, doubt I ever will. Churches are a totally foreign experience to me. If you made me choose candidates based on the sermons their preachers give I couldn't, and I find it insulting that some people think I should. I think they have lost their way, they have lost their American-ness. At least as I understand it.

This country was founded without a national religion. You aren't entitled to impose your religious values on anyone else. It's right there up front in the beginning of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

If the pundits make a difference, then we have to do something about this. I think the only remedy that's going to work is to take this out of the realm of partisanship and outside the realm of punditry. Ask a couple of widely respected Americans, one from each party, to view all the tapes of the Wright sermons, and to talk privately with members of his church and the reverend himself. Listen to both sides. Take testimony from people who object. Get a lawyer to represent the p.o.v that Wright disqualifies Obama to be President and hear him or her out. Depose witnesses. Get someone to take the other side, whatever that is. Let's have a trial. Let's get this out of the realm of sensationalism. We have to create our own venue because the existing ones aren't fair.

My guess is that it won't take ten minutes to see that this is all about race. That the supposed strangeness of the black church is the only issue. I believe this because at first I found the Wright soundbites very offensive, but over time, as they became familiar, I couldn't remember what the fuss was about. I think the whole thing loses its power as it becomes less strange. And the best remedy is to make a huge deal about it, but outside the realm of the idiots on cable news. Dignify the whole thing and the issue evaporates.

The press likes to position itself as the referees, which implies a standard of fairness and impartiality and adherence to well-understood rules. They are only referees in a world gone mad. Let's now create a venue for public discourse that is fair.

Fred Wilson: "At least Barack is not running away from who he is. Hillary is pretending to be a Republican man."

Obama leading McCain in Minnesota

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:25:25 GMT

Rasmussen Minnesota poll: Obama 52%, McCain 38%.

San Francisco from Indian Rock

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:53:45 GMT

Hillary explains what superdelegates do

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:50:46 GMT

HRC: "Voters are an important part of the process."

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/04/24/hrcOnVoters.mp3

For the full context see Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

John McCain a Martian? You decide.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:35:57 GMT

John McCain, spawn of the devil? You decide.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:53:53 GMT

More fun, less stuff

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:47:25 GMT

Bush 1.0

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:18:29 GMT

Nancy & Newt siting on a couch

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:57:30 GMT

Spooky white plant

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:01:29 GMT

Dusty Miller is "grown primarily for its attractive silver-gray foliage..."

IRC for Pennsylvania Primary

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:40:40 GMT

I started a chatroom for tonight's primay.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#PennsylvaniaPrimary

CNN, MSNBC say it's too early to call but HRC is leading.

How to follow me on FriendFeed

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:22:03 GMT

I'm designating FriendFeed as my backup, when Twitter goes down, you can catch my stream, uninterrupted, over there.

Here's how to follow me on FriendFeed.

1. Open an account on FriendFeed, or sign in to an existing account.

2. http://friendfeed.com/davew

3. You should see a "Subscribe to Dave Winer" button below my name. Click it.

4. When Twitter goes down, you can get my full stream, uninterrupted, at FriendFeed. I won't be able to tell you that when Twitter is down, so try to remember it.

5. If you prefer to use a different service, let me know, and I'll try to set it up so you can follow me there. If you can set it up yourself, here's the OPML version of my stream (the source), and the RSS feed derived from the OPML. Pretty sure I'll release the OPML Editor-based tool I'm using to manage the stream.

How to decouple from Twitter, now

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:45:07 GMT

Twitter is still out.

Mike Arrington posits that because they have a monopoly there is no reason for them to hurry to get back online. I agree. That's why we have to break the monopoly now.

And it's not as dire as it may seem, esp for people who use a desktop client.

Here's what the developers of these products can do to make users safe from Twitter outages: Offer users the option to have their stream of outbound tweets saved as an RSS feed that can be read by FriendFeed and other RSS-based tools, in addition to posting directly to Twitter.

Then, the user can do what I did in FriendFeed, point it to the RSS feed, and turn off FriendFeed's connection to Twitter.

In FriendFeed, everyone will still see your updates though a little more slowly. And when Twitter goes down, everyone who cares about your updates can switch over to FriendFeed, perhaps temporarily. That's what Scoble is recommending.

I think FriendFeed should deliberately try to appeal to Twitter users, by reorganizing their UI to be familiar to us, but so far they haven't wanted to do that. However, at some point, some ambitious entrepreneur is going to want to compete with Twitter directly, and all they'll have to do is latch onto our RSS feeds and voila, you don't need Twitter to be up to have the same effect as Twitter. (Is anyone out there ready to go? This would be a fantastic week to launch.)

The only way this bootstrap can happen is if Twitter is down for an extended period while important stuff is going on. Well today is the long-awaited Pennsylvania primary, and the Web 2.0 expo is happening this week in SF. How will we manage without Twitter? Necessity is the mother of invention, imho.

I'd encourage the people who make the desktop tools to get on this right away. If developers want to discuss it here, I'll be online through the day (and grasping for whatever returns are coming in from PA).

A new strategy for Twitter outages

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:32:33 GMT

Okay, I've bit the bullet, I'm going to change what I do when Twitter is down.

1. When Twitter is down I will post updates to an RSS feed.

http://twitter.scripting.com/daveRss.xml

2. You may follow this feed in any tool that can follow an RSS feed. These include FriendFeed, Jaiku and of course many others.

I want to accumulate a list of services that can follow RSS feeds in a Twitter-like fashion (i.e. river of updates). If you know of others, please post a comment here, with detailed user-level instructions for following a feed. I will try to figure out how to add a feed to my profile on FriendFeed. (Any help would be appreciated.)

I feel pretty good about this. I have a nice tool that I might use even when Twitter is up.

Update #1: I've fixed FriendFeed so it's now following, in addition to the feed for scripting.com, and my Twitter and Flickr accounts, also my "rainy day" feed, above. So, if Twitter goes down, you can just start using FriendFeed instead if you want to follow my tweets. Pretty cool. Let's hope they know how to scale!

Update #2: Here's a screen shot that illustrates items from the rainy day feed showing up in my FriendFeed stream. If you follow me over there, you'll get the updates automatically, you don't have to do a thing.

Update #3: Here's a screen shot of the outliner-based tool that I use to author the rainy day feed. I've turned off the connection betw Twitter and FriendFeed, so I'm now committed to using this tool to author my Twitter stream. I think it'll be okay. Already my posting volume is back to normal, even though the Twitter outage persists.

If this were a normal day on Twitter...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:54:53 GMT

It wouldn't be a normal day, because tomorrow is the Pennsylvania primary and a lot of polls are coming out right now, and they're presenting an interesting story. But that story can't be told, because our main communiation platform, Twitter, is down.

Yes, it serves me right, and I, of all people, know better, than to build a network on a single point of failure, depending on one company, that is known for producing unreliable systems in an industry with incredibly thin skin (how can they get better if they won't listen). In other words, this is hardly Murphy's Law, it was easily predictable. It was likely.

In my own defense, we were lulled by months of relatively reliable service from Twitter into believing they were on the path to even more reliability. I stopped encouraging potential competitors to enter the market, now look where we are. No second source (Pownce, as much as I like it, is not a replacement for Twitter, neither is FriendFeed, though I thought they might be, but they said they weren't interested when I visited with them).

We need some big infrastructure companies to get into this game. One is not good enough. We also need standards so that tools that are built to work with one work with the others. There's no time for a standards body, so if you're getting into this business, please, just use the Twitter API, as imperfect as it may seem.

No matter how reliable Twitter seems in the future I won't change my mind about this. We need them to have serious competition, so we have a Plan B when something like this happens, which it will, not a matter of probability, imho.

Update: A new strategy for dealing with Twitter outages. A "rainy day" RSS feed of downtime tweets. Important if you depend on my twitterings.

The Twitter outage persists

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:25:05 GMT

Monday morning, the outage that started Friday night, is still going on.

As a test, I posted a picture last night before signing off, only 62 reads, which is very low for a link that should have gone to over 8000 people. (Admittedly it was Sunday night in the Calif, but Twitter is a world wide thing, and it's already 7:30AM on the east coast of the United States.)

Also, still no notice of the outage and what they're doing to clear it on the Twitter blog.

http://blog.twitter.com/

Not good. :-(

PS: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels checks in on the Twitter outage.

What does an algorithm think?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:52:12 GMT

The only person who knows what it means to be on Techmeme is a former roommate of the person who has always been at the top of every list ranking popularity on Techmeme. I'd rather be judged by people, not code, but if we're supposed to accept the judgment of code, there should be more than one person who knows how it works. And when it says consistently that the author's friend is #1, that's kind of fishy, murky, two bit, Karl Rove. Alberto Gonzalez, third world, banana republic, cheap.

Further, to call most of the posts that show up on Techmeme "tech" is a bit of a stretch. Most of the authors don't know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don't admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it. Further, most of the articles that get linked to by Techmeme aren't about technology, they're about who's buying who, or who's on top of who, or advertising, bubbles, PR, linkbait, etc.

BTW, I temporarily turned off Techmeme so no one can say I'm trolling for links from Techmeme.

A new kind of Twitter outage

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:35:12 GMT

I wasn't sure there was an outage until I read this post on ParisLemon and then this on CNET. I noticed it last night when I came back from a seder after posting a picture from a gas station with a very funny name (or so I thought). Usually when I post a pic to Twitter, even a boring one, even in the middle of the weekend, between 300 and 400 people visit (Flickr keeps track). This time only 60 people had clicked on the link.

Same thing happened with a picture of Wikimedia Foundation lawyer Mike Godwin that I took at the French Hotel in Berkeley yesterday, and a post-seder movie walk through an amazing candy store in Lafayette, taken with my new camera (it takes great movies too).

I also noticed that some of my twits from Friday night were gone. And I had said some controversial things that no one had agreed with or objected to.

Usually when Twitter goes down you get a screen saying it's gone, but this is a new kind of outage, and obviously not a good thing.

ReadWriteWeb turns 5

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:34:03 GMT

Congratulations to founder Richard MacManus and the team at ReadWriteWeb for achieving five years of technical excellence.

Keep up the great work!