Scripting News

Friends Of Dave for Identi.ca

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:22:29 GMT

Just added a way for identi.ca users to follow the Friends-Of-Dave feed.

There's no other way to test it -- I have to push an item through and see if it makes it over to identi.ca in addition to the Twitter place. Let's see if it works...

http://identi.ca/friendsofdave

It does! Cooool.

Friends Of Dave for FriendFeed

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:59:43 GMT

Just one more service, I promise. A test to see if it works...

Blog clip art

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:37:34 GMT

This is a post I've been meaning to write for some time, but this blog post, reviewing the interesting practices of bloggers finally got me off my butt.

If you've been reading Scripting News for a while surely you've noticed the graphics that often appear in the right margin of stories here. Sometimes they are directly related to the story, and other times only artistically. They are meant to invoke your own thoughts and feelings, to show you something about yourself. Whatever they are you can be sure that I found them interesting. Beyond that, what they mean is up to you. That's what art is about, always -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That's why artists cringe when people ask them what the art is about or say that a piece does nothing for them. They'll always come back and ask what it means to you, or say that nothing is something. They're not just saying it to be difficult (although people always think artists are difficult).

Anyway -- the point...

Many times the art I use is commercial, pictures of products. My suggestion is that the companies behind the products should make the clip art easy to find and re-use. Think of it as free brand advertising. Often it's amazingly difficult to find a clippable picture of a product. Examples. Every airline should have an iconic picture of an airplane with their trade dress, on a pure white background. TV sets or laptop computers should come with blank screens, making it easy to superimpose a picture of a dead relative or someone you want to make more interesting by putting them on TV.

The SEO and PR people are all over the place, so guys and gals -- get to work. Every brand should have great clip art for bloggers to use and re-use. It's free advertising. And you guys like free, don't you!

Friends Of Dave

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:31:55 GMT

A Twitter feed with the blog updates of 15 of my friends.

http://twitter.com/friendsOfDave

A dynamic list of the feeds.

.

This post is basically a test of the dynamic list. Let's see if the sucka works!

Update #1: It works. I have to add that having jkOnTheRun at CES makes it mostly unnecessary for me to be there. I've already learned about a new Netgear 3G router. They pretty much precisely care about the things I care about. Keep up the great work. Speaking of which, I had the opportunity to really use the new Cradlepoint router last night at a dinner party, and it works fantastically. Very fast. Super nice to just put the hotspot in the knapsack, turned on, nothing extraneous hanging off my netbook.

Update #2: I added Betsy Devine. I must add some more people I used to hang out with in Boston. The whole point of this exercise is to keep in touch with people I lose touch with. It's possible to do this if we have blogs, and some of them, like Betsy, do.

Update #3: http://identi.ca/friendsofdave

Some babies are destined for greatness

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:49:40 GMT

I met Nicco (center) on my first day at Dean For America in Burlington, VT at the end of the campaign for Iowa. Since then we've been friends, across generations -- and I've become friends with his lovely Morra, and his puppy Rascal (pictured at the left). I've always expected great things from Nicco, but that's nothing compared to the feeling I get about his newborn son, Asa Archibald Mele (who will be known as Archie, I hear). I've only seen him in pictures, and it's probably only through knowing his family that I sense the greatness in this young man.

Born on January 3 of the New Year, in Boston, a warm welcome to Master Archie!

Turning Twitter into my friend-feed

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:37:12 GMT

I was doing a little work on a tool I wrote in April 2007 that pushed RSS content to Twitter, and made a simple enhancement: instead of having a Twitter account reflect the content of a single feed, I made it reflect the content of an arbitrary number of feeds.

This let me do something I've been wanting to do for a while, but never thought of using Twitter for -- I set it up to reflect the content of my blogging friends, people like Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Scoble, Sylvia Paull, Andrew Baron, NakedJen, Nicco Mele, Michael Gartenberg, Marc Canter and a few others.

As usual with experiments, I'm not sure if this is going to amount to anything, but I thought it was worth noting. The tool is twitterRiver.root, and the feed it's associated with is friendsofdave:

http://twitter.com/friendsofdave

You may of course choose to follow this feed if you find it interesting, and I will probably release the tool at some point in the future.

PS: Arrington and Calacanis will find it gratifying that this is an aggregation of blog posts not Twitter fire hoses. That's why it's possible to include Scoble alongside Andrew Baron and Scott Rosenberg, without drowning them out.

Julie and Julia

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:06:06 GMT

Just got an email from Andrew Grumet with an amazing story.

He writes: "Julie Powell, who blogged her way through a Julia Child book on blogs.salon.com. Then the blog got her a book deal and some minor celebrity. Now they're making a movie out of it... with Meryl Streep!!! (in the role of Julia Child).

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/

Chris Lydon did a podcast with Julie Powell in his pioneering 2004 series where he interviewed many of the early bloggers.

How newspapers tried to invent the web

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:06:59 GMT

Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news.

I became a netizen on Compuserve's CB radio, and wrote my own bulletin-board software, LBBS, which then became TankCentral, a way for ThinkTank users to share outlines. When we merged with Symantec, I was still hung up on the idea of the outliner as the way of modeling online discourse, that's why I pushed for us to merge with Think Technologies, and also another company which we didn't get a deal with, who went on to become Microsoft Mail. I felt that MORE was the best way to do networking.

Had Sidhu done a halfway decent job with the Mac networking APIs, I am sure the web would have happened on the Macintosh in the mid-late 80s. We spent countless man-months trying to get MORE to network. When it finally happened, Unix was the central OS for our communication future, and low-tech interfaces took the place of Apple's much more sophisticated networking.

You know it would be great to have a conference someday with all the people who tried to make the web happen before it happened. I'd see a lot of old friends there.

One thing I love about Twitter

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:35:33 GMT

Is the way they display individual twits so bold and big.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1099906420

The other guys should follow this cue.

Apple keynote on Twitter?

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:13:25 GMT

How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?

Who are you following?

Here are some of the people I'd watch...

http://twitter.com/appleinc

http://twitter.com/Gartenberg

http://twitter.com/gruber

http://twitter.com/Veronica

http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

http://twitter.com/ryanblock

http://live.gdgt.com/2009/01/06/live-macworld-2009-keynote-coverage/#sort=desc

Chris Pirillo has the audio. What a trip. You get his editorial comment and the applause is deafening. Hilarious!

I'm in heaven

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:44:03 GMT

The Internet has many wonderful applications, but I doubt if people think of it as a romance platform, but it is.

Case in point. I was looking for some music to play for my friends on Twitter the other night, and I don't remember how I stumbled on this wonderful recording of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing Gershwin's Cheek To Cheek, but it is something else. I recommend putting aside a bit of time later if you don't have time now, and play it on a nice sound system, and get ready for your heart to go to heaven.

But that's not the end of the story.

I remembered seeing the same song sung by Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, in the movie Top Hat. Now Fred's not really a singer like Louis & Ella -- but boy can he dance. The yin and yang! Cheek To Cheek reaches places with Fred & Ginger that you're just going to love.

So the Internet is a history and heart machine. It's love and life. Flirting, dancing, swing, and yeah kisses.

Rethinking authentication

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:16:38 GMT

First a caveat, this is going to be a technical post, so if you're not interested in techie stuff, you can skip it. However, I'm going to try to make it understandable to smart users who are willing to scratch their heads and read it two or three times, if you care to.

There's been a persistent problem in the twittersphere when developers have wanted to enhance the service but require access to the user's account. There's no other way than to ask for the user's login info: their username and password. If the developer is ethical, this is not a problem, it's much like giving credit card information to a vendor. But you can get in trouble when the developer isn't trustworthy and uses your information in malicious ways. We got a taste of this, this weekend.

Immediately people in the know say Use OAuth! -- believing that will solve the problem. I understand OAuth, I've implemented Flickr's authentication system which was the inspiration for OAuth. It's a complicated dance for the app developer, but it provides the user with an important ability that's supposedly available no other way. The user can de-authorize one app without de-authorizing all others. It's true, you can do this with OAuth, but it's not the only way to do it, and it's more complicated for users and developers than the other way, which I'm now going to explain.

I got this idea when Twitter rate-limited me yesterday. I was debugging some code, and I guess I made more than 100 calls in an hour. Now I can't make any more calls from my LAN (even though it's been almost 24 hours since the offense). This showed me one very important thing -- Twitter has the ability to block calls by IP address. That's the key.

Okay, so now assume I've given my username/password to Wimpy's App Shop, who has a neat little Twitter add-on gizmo that I love, and everything's going great until one day Wimpy, whose shop is suffering in the recession, decides to make a little extra money by selling my login to Bluto's Greasy Spoon Spamporium, who proceeds to send huge numbers of phishing messages to Chris Brogan, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina and Guy Kawasaki. This is very annoying. We must stop it at once!

Now imagine that Twitter had a page that showed all the IP addresses that have used your login in the last 30 days, with a start date for each and a count of calls made. I bet you could figure out which one was The Greasy Spoon Group, pronto. Further suppose there was a checkbox next to each IP address. You could uncheck that one, click Submit, and voila, no more spam from your account. You just did everything that OAuth promises to let you do, and no one had to implement the dance. It worked with today's simple and klunky worse-is-better authentication system.

Now IP addresses are ugly and not informative, so add a little enhancement, and have Twitter do a reverse DNS lookup for each one. If something simple came back, like appshop.com and not adsl-86-229-2-19.dsl.pltn90.sbcglobal.net, display it instead of the IP address. Now it would be even easier to spot the nasty dude.

That's it, that's the idea. I think this works -- do you see any problems??

Update: Great comments. Over on the Twitter blog, Biz says they're going to release a closed beta of OAuth this month.

Why our customers are smart

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:50:00 GMT

I often tell stories about companies who treat their customers or developers as if they were idiots. But that's not to say my own company, the one I started, didn't do this too -- it did. It's human nature, but it's bad human nature, it's self-defeating, it's dysfunctional.

When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that's true we're really fucked.

Here's how I reasoned...

1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.

2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we're dead, so you'd better start looking for a new job

The only logical way to proceed is to:

1. Make the best product.

2. Find the smartest customers.

3. Treat them like the geniuses they are.

4. And earn their respect. (Which they never failed to give us, as long as we did 1, 2 and 3.)

Our customers really were the smartest people -- we made products that you had to be smart to want. But I think every company has to feel their customers are the smartest, or else why bother coming to work?

Further, we don't look for "feedback" from customers, we look to learn from them. Feedback is what you ignore. Learning is how you build.

"cheesecake"

RSS as the foundation for realtime

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:20:38 GMT

Steve Gillmor has been on a campaign to get Feedburner to wake up and make his Feedburner feed more responsive. I support him in this. Now that Feedburner is pwned by Google, there's something kind of sneaky about a big company that prides itself on keeping its servers up and responsive all the time to be asleep on this.

To be fair to Google, it's not 100 percent clear if Steve's website is pinging them on the feed update. This is something we could look into because the protocol for pinging is something we're all pretty familiar with, since its been around for a long time and it's pretty simple. There's an XML-RPC interface, even a REST interface. Google operates a compatible ping server. You don't even have to know the protocol, since Matt Mullenweg kindly put up a server that pings them all. Just tell him what changed and let him make the call for you.

However, it is the very end of the Christmas holiday, so that may be the reason. A wire-trip, and no one is watching the store. That's the danger of centralizing a decentralizing technology like RSS. Like the Internet itself it can route around outages, but only if you let it be distributed. This points out the need for an open source easy to install version of Feedburner. Now with cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft's upcoming Azure, and Google's own AppEngine, it would be a simple matter to put something together in any number of different languages that would provide all the benefits of Feedburner (stats mainly) without the problems of excessive centralization.

Steve called a few minutes ago, and I volunteered to write about this. I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air, whether it's a small independent project or something run by Microsoft.

Update: Feedsqueezer.

Twitter in 140 characters

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:31:34 GMT

Jay Rosen asked: "Write a 140 character post that explains what you find Twitter useful for."

DW: "Twitter is my shared notepad. If I want to remember something and I don't mind if everyone else knows it, I just post it here."

Only 126 characters.

Why Twitter can't be conversational for me

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:37:01 GMT

I've tried to use it conversationally, but it quickly falls apart.

Consider an example.

Suppose I say the sky is blue.

Someone says: "What do you mean by that?"

Now I have three choices: 1. Ignore it. 2. Ask what they're referring to. 3. Assume they mean my statement that the sky is blue, and explain what it means for the sky to be blue.

Suppose I choose #2. Because I might have said 5 things in the last hour, and how do I know which one my correspondent is referring to. So I respond: "Which item are you referring to?" But before my friend can respond someone else asks "What are you talking about?" Now to that one I have three possible choices, the same ones as before.

Back up a step. I could have chosen #3. How do you explain what it means for the sky to be blue in 140 characters? And if you try, someone else will ask you to explain your explanation. But how will you know which twit they're referring to!

Right around this time someone chimes in with a political objection to something I've said. By trying to cram real conversation into 140 character snippets, you're bound to offend someone, because in order to be politically correct you have to allow for the possibility that you're talking about a man or a woman, someone who is young or old or inbetween, or if you assume they're American you'll get a lecture on how all Americans think everyone is an American or somesuch.

Honestly don't see how anyone gets past the first step in a conversation, but as I've gotten more people following me, the opportunities get narrower. When I try to satisfy everyone, what happens then is someone tells me I'm posting too much and I should STFU or they're going to unsubscribe. Ohhh.

So when someone asks me a question that I want to answer, I DM them. But usually I choose option #1. For me it's not and can't be conversational.

Mac at 25

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:11:33 GMT

On January 24, 1984 a couple thousand people were present at Flint Center in Cupertino at the birth of something with real lasting value, the Macintosh.

It's corny for sure -- but it was exciting.

Hard as it is to believe -- that was almost 25 years ago!

http://mac25.org/

My company rolled out a product that day too: ThinkTank 128. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Mike Boich. Guy was Apple's first evangelist and Mike was the head of their developer program. And there were many other great people involved in the Mac in the early days.

As Archie sang to Edith, those were the days!!

It would be great if, over the next 21 days, we could connect with people who were part of that day. Apple's remembrances have (understandably) focused on the Apple people who made the Mac work. But it would be interesting to know who else got their start then and what they went on to accomplish -- where they are now.

Update: Here's someone selling a shrink-wrap copy of ThinkTank 128.

Helping FriendFeed?

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:31:28 GMT

Louis Gray offers some noble help to FriendFeed, filling in as the marketing department they don't have. Of course it would help if they did do some marketing. They may not be aware of it, but Twitter didn't just wait for people to come to them, they put up displays all over SXSW in 2007 to boot up with that community, who already knew them from Blogger days, to be the first core group of users of the service. I could see it happen, even though I wasn't part of the service then, and I wasn't at SXSW. FriendFeed hasn't done anything like this as far as I know.

Anyway, I think I know what they should do, and it isn't on Louis's list. But I wonder why I should give them the idea. This goes back to the point Arrington made a week ago, and then made again in his scolding of Scoble -- why are you working for these guys for free? It's a good question and one that bothers me, a lot.

Instead, I'd like to ask another question. Does anyone really think that a company-owned platform is going to win here, that it won't be swamped by an open federated system of servers that peer, like email? If so, I'd like to hear why. We went through this exercise repeatedly in the tech industry; the lesson of history is clear -- closed systems have their place and time, at the beginning of a new layer, when users need simplicity over everything else, they serve as training wheels when everyone is a newbie. Eventually we grow out of the need to have our hands held and the freedom of open systems becomes attractive, and we jump. It happened with mail, with the web, maybe not so much with IM (that's probably what they're counting on).

I'd much rather give the idea to the ether, not to a company. Let's have competition.

In the meantime, the clue is in the piece I wrote in early December. (I can't help it, I have to share ideas, it's the way I'm built I guess.)

MediaWiki API

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:56:01 GMT

Well, thanks to Andrew Burton I got access to a MediaWiki installation with the API turned on, and I was able to make a couple of trivial calls successfully, but I hit a wall when it came to doing the thing I set out to do. I have no doubt from reading the docs that it's possible, I just can't figure out what the dance is.

My problem may stem from not being a MediaWiki user. I'm doing this job for Doc Searls, who wrote a passionate plea to be able to edit his wiki with the OPML Editor. From a quick glance at the MediaWiki API docs I was pretty sure I'd be able to put something together. I like writing glue for XML-based APIs, it's fairly rewarding work, cause when I'm done there's another cool thing I can do with my outliner, even though it's not likely that I'll use it, personally.

I had hoped today to be writing a piece about how I got it to work but no luck. It's actually a plea for help. Here goes.

1. What I need is the equivalent of the Metaweblog API. Calls to create a new document (in wiki terms probably a "page"), to get and set the text to an existing document. That's basically it. For bells and whistles there are categories and media objects, but Doc probably doesn't need those so much as he needs to be able create and edit pages on his wiki.

2. I understand that I need to login and get a token. I have the call to login working, so I don't need help there. I probably can figure out how to get a token, but what to do with it? Oy. The docs really assume you know what you're doing before you read them.

3. I think the docs they have get pretty close to getting me going, but I won't be sure until I'm actually going.

If you can shed any light on what's happening here, it would be much appreciated. Assume in advance that I know I'm a pathetic dork with no life, if you skip that part of your advice it would be much appreciated too.

CradlePoint PHS300 first look

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:12:07 GMT

The new router arrived this evening, I charged it up, followed the minimal instructions, and it worked the first time. I'm using the router now to write this blog post.

I'll have unboxing pictures soon, but first the speed test.

speedtest.net thinks I'm in Kansas City, MO.

People ask why I lusted for this and the answer is the same reason I want one of these. A 3G battery-operated router that fits in a coat pocket, or a pocket on a knapsack, or in the glove box of a car -- very rational idea. A perfect fit for netbooks, and you know how ga-ga I am over those. For a while it looked like netbook "service plans" were going to catch on, hence the $99 netbook meme, but this is smarter. Why should the netbook have the service plan -- instead I'll use the USB modem I already have, plug it into the CradlePoint, and get on the net using wifi, which all netbooks already have. It's still a little klunkier than the Novatel approach, but this one is shipping, and it's pretty close.

If they had gotten this to me before Thursday I would have said this is the most rational product of the year for 2008, also the one that makes me the most giddy with a living-in-the-future feeling, right up there with the Eee PC. It would be hard to choose between the two. Wish I had had this at the DNC in Denver.

It has a very nice browser-based config system, so there's a web server built into the router. Screen shot of the Dynamic DNS config page.

Here's the set of unboxing pictures.