Scripting News

California weather

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:10:47 GMT

Just a few days ago we were sweltering with near-100 degree heat, and today, it's so cold out we have the furnace on. I'll take the cold weather any day, but it would be nice to settle into a summer weather pattern at some point.

Arrington, Feldman & Israel

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:35:56 GMT

I'm forwarding this link to my readers, without comment, at this time. Please read it and give it your consideration.

Shel Israel: About Loren Feldman & Michael Arrington.

Thanks, Dave

Can Twitter become ubiquitous?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:42:15 GMT

First today's news: Twitter announced investments from Spark and Bezos. Bijan Sabet will become a Twitter board member. They haven't announced a business model, their approach is to get big and stable and figure it out later. Unlike some, I don't see any problem with this approach. Lots of companies have made their investors very happy (and users) with such an approach.

Disclaimer: I have two friends on Twitter's board -- Sabet and Fred Wilson. Yet, I say exactly what I think about the company, as a user and a developer. I don't think Bijan or Fred would have it any other way.

Mike Arrington: "If they can get the platform stable, I believe they will eventually become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, sms and other forms of communication."

This is an interesting idea that deserves serious discussion.

I agree that Twitter is that useful that it could become as ubuiquitous and valuable as email, IM and SMS. However, they have to become a fully open platform before that can happen. I don't believe it will become ubiquitous in its current form. The platform owner has too much power. And there are disturbing indications that it may take more power. The fact that they can do this unilaterally is the big limit on Twitter's growth. It will be hard for investors to risk on new ideas that build on Twitter knowing that the company can foreclose on them at any time.

6/21/08: "I was forwarded an email yesterday posted by a Twitter employee to their developer mailing list that suggests that once Twitter is healthy the terms will change, requiring developers to get a license from the company to use data that previously was available without a license. This is exactly what developers hate, because Twitter gets to decide how much competition they want, they can reserve markets for themselves, even ones they're not serving. No one should have this power, it's not a healthy situation for anyone, not even Twitter, imho. Can't help but think they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg here. Also feels a bit screwy that we helped them build their network, for free (isn't it funny people only look at how they give stuff away) -- only to find that now they want to take back what was open about it."

It's actually worse than I said on Saturday. They can decide retroactively to take over markets that were once the province of developers. Now, that can't happen in email or IM -- there's no single vendor that has the power to destroy businesses without even launching a product. At this stage in the market development, that's too much power. Bijan and Fred, ask yourselves what guarantee you'd need from Twitter to feel comfortable investing in its aftermarket. I don't think you'd settle for anything less than complete freedom, upfront, before you invest a dime.

Getting NewsJunk through IM

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:46 GMT

I haven't tried it, but this comes recommended...

http://www.imfeeds.com/

Since there's a NewsJunk RSS feed, it should work.

I'm going to try it now. Please let me know if it works for you.

Update #1: It was pretty easy to join.

Update #2: I signed up to follow the NewsJunk RSS feed. It took a while but a new item showed up. And like FriendFeed, they ignore the RSS <description> element, which is a mistake, I think. Here's a screen shot.

Okay, there was a short description that went with that item. Why not push it down the line?

How to push stories to NewsJunk using del.icio.us

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:42:56 GMT

Underneath its simple user interface there's a lot of RSS that goes into NewsJunk. It's like flour to cake or ice to hockey. The product is more than RSS, but without it, it wouldn't be happening.

As you know I've been re-exploring del.icio.us, yesterday I asked if it could do what FriendFeed does, keep a feed synched with its internal structure, and found out that the only way to do this was to write a script. I decided not to do that, at this time, but I did write a script that made our FriendFeed support much better. It wasn't refreshing often enough, only once an hour, which makes the news not-so-fresh. And it bothered me that even though FF can display longish bits of text, more than Twitter, the descriptions in RSS feeds were ignored. Well, if you use the FriendFeed API, you can get around both of these problems. It took a couple of hours to connect NewsJunk to FF through their API, and it's really nice. Highly recommended.

Another dividend of this exploration is that I hooked up my inbound del.icio.us links feed to NewsJunk so there's a way for anyone, through del.icio.us, to add a story to the input flow, just send a link to "for/scripting".

However, there's no guarantee that it will appear in the output flow, we're a very focused site, our only interest is US national politics. We're willing to wander off-topic for a moment or two, for example when George Carlin died on Sunday, that story was added to the flow. When OPEC meets to talk about oil prices, that's grist for our mill, because oil prices are a huge issue in the 2008 election. And when a NASA scientist says that this, now, is the last minute to take drastic action to head off a global warming disaster, we put that in too, because while it isn't a major campaign issue, perhaps it should?

The basic qualification for inclusion is the same as for a blog -- would an informed person want to be aware of this fact or point of view? That's why we run outrageous claims from both sides, because even if you support the candidate they're defaming, you should still know what they're saying about your guy.

Also, the better FriendFeed interface gives us a place to discuss news events. I notice that people are starting to do that, and I think it's great! Use all the tools and learn from them and each other. This is how politics and the Internet move forward, we think we're right on the leading edge, and want to keep pushing.

I may have found Scoble's hook

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:30:21 GMT

Heh. I've been wondering when Scoble would discover NewsJunk. I think today I finally baited the hook, dropped the line, and he took the bait. Maybe!

I've been deliberately not trying to get my "friends" in Silicon Valley to write about my new offering because I want to see how well they pick up on things outside their own Beltway. I love these guys, Om, Arrington, Scoble, Gillmor, but I want to earn my flow, not be given it. I think NewsJunk is good enough for them to care about it all on its own, not as some kind of favor to me.

Now here's how I baited Scoble...

I was tuned in to his QikCast of his panel at PDF in NY, and heard him say that Memeorandum was the fastest way to get breaking political news just like Techmeme in the tech blogosphere. I posted a twit, disagreeing, I don't think Memeorandum is good at fast-breaking news, it has a 24-hour cycle, and top stories tend to stick there for the full cycle, keeping other less phenomenal stories that we see quickly in NewsJunk from showing up there at all.

Sometimes they show up 24 hours after they happen! That's just not good enough for news in a political year. That's why we started NewsJunk -- to scratch the itch that Nicco and I (and many others) had. We tried to imagine the news system that Chuck Todd deserved, or Joe Trippi, David Axelrod, Josh Marshall or even Barack Obama himself. (McCain, only being "aware" of the Internet is not in a position to use it).

The theory being that if it's good enough for a pro, it would also be good enough for a schmuck like me.

And Nicco is a pro. Not in Silicon Valley but inside the Beltway. And he's my buddy, and a programmer (he led the tech team at Dean For America in 2004).

So I hope it also works for Scoble.

Remember Scoble? That's who this story is about.

Scoble said to me he gets most of his news from Summize and FriendFeed.

Bing!

Now you gotta know that we designed NewsJunk in the post-Twitter world, and we use this stuff, seriously, so of course you can get NewsJunk in FriendFeed.

http://friendfeed.com/newsjunk

And what do you think Summize summizes? Twitter!

We supported Twitter on Day One.

We got you covered Scoble old dude!

"cheesecake"

del.icio.us question

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:36:49 GMT

I've started to use del.icio.us recently, as part of the editorial flow for NewsJunk, and it's making me think of ways of integrating the two.

Now, I understand how I can get an RSS feed out of del.icio.us, the question is -- how do I get one in?

I want all the stories that show up in the NewsJunk feed to become one of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, much as they flow through to FriendFeed.

Is there a way to do this?

Update: From the comments it's very clear they don't have the feature. I'm not going to write a script, it was only of passing interest, in no way is it mission critical. The functionality is already in FriendFeed. I just thought there might be an easy way to provide NewJunk headlines to people through del.icio.us. Thanks for all the great advice!

Rethinking the conference

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:30:35 GMT

"Why are you going to that conference?" asks Jack.

"Just to hang out with the people," says Jill.

It's a cliche and nothing new. As long as I've been going to conferences, almost 30 years, that's what people say, and do. Everyone's in the room for the first few speeches and panels, but their eyes are fixed on their laptops. And after an hour or so, most of the people are out in the hallway.

So, when I was designing my own conference in 2003, I decided to do something different -- I moved the conference out of the hallway and into the meeting room. Or you can think of it the other way around. I tried to imagine what a conference would be like if you held it in the hallway.

We reserved a suite of five classrooms and recruited Discussion Leaders (DLs), and tried to explain the format on the phone. I asked the DLs to think of the entire room as a panel. Two of them, well-intentioned, had recruited a few people they knew and asked them to come to the front. I rotated between the rooms, when I saw this, I asked the people in the front to take seats in the body. I made the DL stand in front, and lead the discussion. I remember the instant Jeff Jarvis, for example, understood what I was looking for -- he ran with it, as far as I could tell everyone had a grand time (Jarvis is a fantastic DL). By the time the day was over, the format had been worked out, and get this -- the hallways were empty! The conversations that used to happen in the hallway were now happening in the conference.

There's so much to say about this. And at one time or another I think I've said it all, as have others. Why people continue to have the old kind of conference where the room empties out and the "good stuff" happens in the hallway is a mystery to me.

So why does it work?

Well, for one thing, the DL is encouraged to call on people. So you have to stay on your toes.

The lights stay on.

No Powerpoints.

And you'd be surprised to find out that some people you've never heard of actually have something to say. You get to meet new people this way. That's one of the reasons people go to conferences, no? Also there are people who conference promoters avoid because they upset sponsors. Why should you or I care about that? Wouldn't you like to hear what they think? (Maybe we should just have a conference with only people who sponsors don't like. Heh.)

When doesn't it work?

If people in the "audience" feel they have a right to speak, to drone on and on, like a person on one of the old-style panels. No one has that right, the DL is fully empowered to pick the speakers, in real time, even interrupt people, cut them off, take the discussion in completely new directions. This often rubs people the wrong way, but it has to work this way, otherwise the discussion repeats in loops and gets caught in one of several traps that all open unstructured discussions die in. (The classic -- "How do I make money doing this?" as if the only things worth doing are ones that you make money. We often choose to do things that cost money -- going out to eat, buying a present for someone you like, filling up the gas tank, paying the mortgage, going to a conference, paying taxes, paying lawyers.)

It takes a lot of perseverance to make this new kind of conference work, but it's worth doing. You can really solve problems this way. At the upcoming PDF conference in NY (starts tomorrow) they could have a DL-based session about the issues raised in the recent AP fracas. Or what becomes of campaign finance reform. What to do if Bush attacks Iran before he leaves office. These are just a few juicy political discussions that people might have opinions about.

The assumption behind this approach, which used to be called "unconference" before the name was usurped by a very different kind of conference, is that the eloquence and intelligence in the room are distributed not concentrated. People who usually speak at these things are not the only ones with something to say. If you want people to be bored and frustrated, put them in a seat in a dark auditorium and force them to listen to five people drone on about how they are great, have it tough, how the hard problems can't be solved but we have to solve them anyway, or god knows what they're talking about sometimes. As Marc Canter used to say "When you turn the lights out, someone just fell asleep."

I think conferences can be places where people wake up instead of falling asleep. I've seen it happen. I hope we can do some more of these, I hope someday they become the norm in conferences.

Update: No lining up behind a mike waiting for your turn to speak, when it's your turn, the mike comes to you. When people line up they expect to speak in the order they're lined up in, and that ruins the whole thing. They also write speeches in their head while they're waiting, get nervous, and you end up with the same kind of BS you get in panel discussions

Julia Allison: "Discussions are how I learn best."

Dancers in the park

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:21:49 GMT

Morning coffee notes

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:22:16 GMT

It's going to be another scorcher here in Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area. You can just feel it. Everything is still hot from yesterday, no time for things to cool off, and while the low humidity means that the outside temp is in the 60s, as soon as the sun rises it's going to get hot again. No buffer.

BTW, to people from Austin and Florida, even the northeast, who say this is nothing, they deal with much worse -- you have air conditioning. Almost no one does in the Bay Area. So when it gets hot, it just gets hot. Indoors and out.

Yesterday the AP-blogger crisis ended. I still think the blogosphere over-reacted, I don't think there was ever a chance that the AP would pursue the case, but it's right to be concerned that it's not over yet. It seems the AP wants to protect their headline and lead paragraphs (why do they call it "lede" -- makes no sense to me). If you take a step back and think of them instead of you for a moment (hard to do, I know) -- this is the most expensive copy they have, the most crafted. As a writer myself (Jay Rosen says so) I respect the quality of writing in heds and ledes. As a blogger and a user of sites that aggregate them, though, I see the other side.

It also seems that fair use is on their side, btw. The headline and lead paragraph summarize what's in the body of the article. If you're reacting to the whole article then just link to it, as I link to Saul Hansell's article in the previous paragraph. On the other hand, in most cases the pubs want you to link to their article enough to give up a bit of their rights. It's like companies don't object if you publish their commercials on YouTube, the more exposure the better. But the AP is a bit of an albatross, they make nothing on flow, they are in the licensing business. So this battle may just be about AP and Reuters, not USA Today and the NY Times, which use a different business model.

What would be great is to have a discussion, even an argument, without the posturing and breast-beating. It's all bluffing, a play for more attention, page-reads, flow, money.

Anyway...

The AP issue is fertile ground for a blogger shitstorm, but there are other issues worth looking at. However if technology is at issue, most users (and most bloggers are users not developers) say "You fix it" -- never stopping to realize that developers have interests too, and my interests might be different from that of a big company or a company that wants to be big. The BigCos take advantage of that confusion. Very often it's the users who get screwed in the process.

I was forwarded an email yesterday posted by a Twitter employee to their developer mailing list that suggests that once Twitter is healthy the terms will change, requiring developers to get a license from the company to use data that previously was available without a license. This is exactly what developers hate, because Twitter gets to decide how much competition they want, they can reserve markets for themselves, even ones they're not serving. No one should have this power, it's not a healthy situation for anyone, not even Twitter, imho. Can't help but think they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg here. Also feels a bit screwy that we helped them build their network, for free (isn't it funny people only look at how they give stuff away) -- only to find that now they want to take back what was open about it.

Twitter lost a lot of momentum with users in the last months. Now is not the time, as the service appears to be coming back on line, to introduce doubt about its future. It has lots of that. We need more certainty.

Newsweek poll results

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:26:44 GMT

I don't generally report polls here, but this one is too stunning not to report. The link came to us via Pollster.com, it's currently the top item on NewsJunk, but it hasn't been reported yet on CNN or MSNBC.

The Newsweek numbers: Obama 51%, McCain 36%.

As they say on Newsweek -- he got his bounce.

A note to Obama supporters, of whom I am one, it isn't over until there's an election and that won't happen until November. But this could be the big turning point.

Update from Doc Searls

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:41:15 GMT

Doc says he's not being courageous, just fighting for his life in a Boston hospital and blogging the whole thing, trusting the universe that everything's going to work out. Good news, it is! He's sucking ice chips and may get out as soon as Sunday. Keep on truckin big dude.

Heat wave

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:26:49 GMT

It's not usually this hot in Berkeley.

Four or five days like this a year. Whew. Hard to stay cool. Not used to this.

DNC plan B -- It worked!

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:09:06 GMT

I want to go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August -- where they will nominate Barack Obama. It was only four years ago when Obama addressed the blogger's breakfast and we all wondered who is this guy, and then he gave the keynote, a rousing speech that served as the platform for the 2008 campaign (he probably knew exactly what he was doing, even then). Now he's the leader of the party, and I really hope on his way to being the next President of the United States.

So I applied to be a blogger at this instance of the DNC, after having done exactly that at the 2004 convention in Boston. I was turned down. No matter, I bounced back and asked if I could still participate in the convention as press, and guess what -- they said okay. So I'm going to Denver. Yehi!

BTW, I still have conventionbloggers.com. Even though I'm not a blogger, I could still pretend.

Hat's off to Doc

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:53:48 GMT

Doc Searls has been fighting to regain his health in a Boston-area hospital. You can read all about it on his blog. I admire his courage in exposing so much of his struggle publicly. I've never been exactly where he is, when I had my one-week hospital stay six years ago (in exactly this period of June) when I got out of surgery I was seriously weak, but already in much better health than I was before the surgery. I was relatively young and fit, so the recovery was more or less a straight line, with few setbacks. As you get older it becomes more of a struggle. If you're not in good shape it's more of a struggle. Eventually, no matter how well you care for yourself, you'll lose the battle, and gravity pulls you into the ground. That's what Doc is fighting. A sequence of events that could kill him. It seems he's gaining. A mutual friend has visited him and says he's going to survive this, but it's not a pretty picture.

I admire that Doc has the courage to document the experience, for everyone. I fought for privacy in 2002, only sharing what was happening with close family and friends. A few readers figured out what hospital I was at and called, I really resented the intrusion. For me the lines between personal and public life are sacred, and never crossed. As a friend of Doc's I appreciate the information, I would much rather be in the loop than guess his condition. But I could certainly understand if he didn't want to share the data with the world, esp if it interfered with his recovery.

He's not the first to document such a struggle, but he is the first of my friends to do it. Bravo Doc, and best wishes for a speedy recovery. Seriously.

When Twitter is down...

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:49:18 GMT

You can go to the beach, take a walk or climb a tree.

Or quietly go crazy.

Or you can use http://twitabit.com/ -- a sweet little tool from the folks at SwitchABit. It knows when Twitter is down, and queues your messages until it comes back.

PS: I own a little bit of this company, so you know.

PPS: Of course twitabit has an API. It does the queuing thing too.

The AP mess, day 4

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:18:11 GMT

I gotta say the AP guys are digging the hole deeper every time they communicate.

But the bloggers aren't helping. Almost everyone seems to be making the story bigger than it is, with a few exceptions.

Scott Rosenberg is doing his usual excellent job of reporting. Sticking with what he knows to be true, and carefully saying what is speculation and what is not. Even Rogers Cadenhead, who I sometimes think as the blogger's equiv of Al Sharpton, is actively trying to douse the flames. But Mike Arrington, who I sometimes think of as the blogger equiv of Lou Dobbs, sees a conspiracy.

Fact is, while I don't support or belong to the Media Bloggers Association, it has been around for a long time. A lot of the bloggers who are expressing their rage are careful to say that they never heard of them, which is hard to refute, but a simple check at archive.org shows that the website has been around since August 2004. It was launched at BloggerCon III in November 2004, at Stanford.

Robert Cox is a real person. He's a Republican, a bit outrageous, but seems harmless, and I think he's doing good work. The blogger who's being harassed by the AP needs help, he's providing it. The press statement by the AP makes it sound like something more is happening. See my first paragraph. They need to learn how to communicate publicly. Amazing isn't it -- here's a media organization that is doing a super poor job of participating in media. The problem for them is that on this side, when they're the source of the controversy, they're just a big corporate entity without much experience. Of course their reporters (are they covering this -- they should, imho) could teach them a thing or two.

We've been around this block so many times. When Dan Rather was being picked to death by right wing bloggers, CBS should have split in two, one half responding to the outrage, and the other half covering it, all sides, all angles. Their reporters had unique access and perspective, and could have presented a more balanced story, one that included left wing bloggers and the core of the story that the right wing guys didn't want anyone to pay attention to -- the hypocrisy of attacking a guy who served in Vietnam on behalf of a guy who dodged the draft at the same time. That story got buried because reporters didn't do their jobs.

I've been where AP is now, when in 2004 I gave up on weblogs.com hosting. I got the shaft from bloggers, and initially from the pros too. But when the furor settled, the pros were willing to take another look and decide if the story had been fairly reported. The bloggers weren't willing.

It was then I realized that this panacea I had envisioned in 1995 had turned out a bit differently than I had imagined. I thought bloggers were going to keep the press honest. Here was a case where the opposite was true. This led me to a softer position re pros -- I believe we need both approaches, and the bloggers who just want to lynch AP are engaging in the worst kind of discourse, it's anti-intellectual, they jump to conclusions, ignore information that contradicts their assumptions that's easily available, and points of view that don't agree with theirs. This is worse than what AP is doing, their lawsuits will not happen, not unless they want to commit corporate suicide. But the bitterness of this shitstorm will linger, for a long time to come.

PS: I noticed yesterday that the NY Times is starting a social network. Told you so. Starting in 2002, and many times since, I asked them to give all reporters blogs, and offer nytimes.com hosted blogs to everyone who is quoted in a Times story. Imagine if they had done that, the kind of social network they'd have now, and the difference in discourse in the blogosphere. Sure it would be opinionated, lynch mobs may still have formed, but some of the authority of the Times would have rubbed off. One can hope. It's still possible and it's still a good idea.

AP mess, day 3

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:04:51 GMT

I spoke with Jim Kennedy at AP this afternoon and talked about the controversy over how bloggers should link to and use information published by the AP. I asked him to look at one of my sites to tell me if it was infringing, and he said it was not, which should put to rest some of the concerns that bloggers have expressed. Please listen to this podcast to get an idea of what happened, and where I think we should go from here.

NewsJunk on Facebook!

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:12:13 GMT

Facebook is the 8th way to follow NewsJunk.

Reddit goes open source

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:17:06 GMT

A very welcome development, as I've written here earlier, I am interested in one-off special micro-community news voting systems.

I wonder how easy it is to install your own Reddit? Any user experiences would be welcome.