Scripting News

I like my sex (and scifi) with mystery!

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:09:58 GMT

I think it's true of all literature, media and sex -- that it's not what you say that creates the attraction, it's what you don't say. Or don't show. Or don't know.

The imagination may be the most pleasurable or pleasure-seeking organ in the human body.

A naked woman isn't necessarily as sexy as one wearing clothes, something many visitors to a nude beach are surprised to discover. It's not a turn-on to see the naked bodies, full disclosure isn't sexy. It's the path, how you got there that creates the excitement.

It's something we discovered in the early days of podcasting, something that was known to our parents' generation, that listening to radio programs activates the imagination in ways that television and movies never can. It's almost physiological. The human brain can't help itself, it must fill in unknown detail. So if you tell a story with words and no pictures, the imagination takes over and tells the rest of the story.

Have you ever been shocked to find out what a favorite radio talk show host looks like, how different it was from who you imagined him or her to be? That's the effect.

In this way, the remake of Battlestar Galactica has been one of the most smashing successes of television scifi. Every time they fill in a blank, they reveal five unknowns to take its place, and your mind takes off wondering who or what is behind the next set of doors.

But now the series is in its final run of episodes, and last night was the first installment of that run, and now we know a lot of what we didn't know before. The characters are all depressed, as we are -- because the fun is over? What could possibly be next.

Heather Havrilesky, writing in Salon, says it's always like this. We remember the first Star Wars in 1977 (I sure do, I saw it at a packed theater on Capitol Square in Madison in the middle of a raging snow storm with a half-dozen room mates). "There's an evil guy and a princess (a princess!) and robots and planets with three suns. Suddenly, the whole world feels like it belongs to you!" Three years later I'm in Sunnyvale, watching the next installment with a business associate, but it's just not the same. The magic isn't there.

Maybe the same with Battlestar Galactica. But only maybe. We don't know how this is going to turn out.

But now maybe I'm seeing the wisdom of the finale of The Sopranos. Maybe I don't want resolution of everything, maybe the series should end on the Mother Of All Cliff Hangers, the greatest imaginable, and one that never gets resolved.

We've already got a tease of what that might be, but there's still nine episodes to go, and I plan to watch each with the hope to not know everything, and to be delighted by the mystery.

A URL Czar for Google?

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:11:21 GMT

A simple idea in a twit.

Google should hire someone to beautify their URLs. Seriously would make their products 100 percent more attractive and usable.

I'm always cleaning up their URLs. Why can't they do that for me?

For example -- a Google Map link to the Empire State Building:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Empire+State+Building,+New+York,+NY&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=46.36116,66.708984&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=A

And if you don't sign out first, they include your home address in the URL. Oy. Talk about security leaks. Geez Louise. Someone at Google, please get a clue!

Anyway why shouldn't this be, simply:

http://maps.google.com?q=Empire+State+Building,+New+York,+NY

I just filled out my profile. Its url is:

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/103628798844723879427

Why not:

http://users.google.com/dave.winer/

And on and on.

Lady Bird Johnson had a program to beautify America's highways. Google needs someone to beautify their information superhighway.

Instant Outlining gets discovered

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:48:00 GMT

This is quite an article. Very gratifying.

Twitter asks What are you doing? the Instant Outliner asks you to Narrate Your Work.

It's a project I developed in parallel with Radio 8, in 2001. We used it internally at UserLand to coordinate work among the people on the team who were in California, Seattle, Boston, Vancouver and Germany. We were spread across a lot of time zones and geography, but our work was remarkably well coordinated because we had what I think is the best management technology ever. As the manager of the team, I can tell you I never had a better read on what my guys were doing. I could see progress on various sub-projects, get feedback from everyone, build consensus, spot problems.

The reason why Radio 8 was such a great release was because we had a great workgroup tool -- the Instant Outliner.

We tried to release it as a product, but it didn't catch on. Partly, I think, because people were using Radio as a web server, and it was confusing that it was also an outliner. The mode flip blew up the suspension of disbelief. You had to really understand the technology to make the switch.

You also had to have a workgroup ready to use it, and that may have been the biggest reason it didn't gain traction. It wasn't hard for us to find individuals who were turned on by the idea, but when they in turn had to convince their co-workers to use the tool, that's when it fell down. It worked at UserLand because: 1. We were all techies. 2. I made it a requirement. 3. I was the boss. 4. But more importantly, I had their respect. And for some people it was impossible for them to get on board, they just weren't that organized or systematic in their work, but that may not have been apparent before we started using the Instant Outliner, it certainly became very apparent when we did. And it helped me, as the manager, know where I had to focus some attention, to help keep the individuals on track. Wouldn't have known it otherwise, esp in such a geographically diverse team.

Anyway, if people are interested, esp now that things like Twitter and FriendFeed are out there, we could try again. I actually have been working on and off on the I/O tool since we started NewsJunk last summer. During the Christmas break I took some time to convert it to run on top of FriendFeed's realtime API, and it make it much more efficient and much faster. They really do some good work down there at FF. Their back-end is a perfect match for the I/O front-end. (Which by the way, runs inside the OPML Editor.)

No matter what it's wonderful to see people discovering this work, and seeing it with new relevance given the state of technology today.

My heartfelt epic blog post about Steve Jobs

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:24:38 GMT

Apple CEO Jobs

Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs.

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Update: Scoble says you'd be an idiot to sell your AAPL.

A new way of linking in tweets

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:20:08 GMT

Following up on the discussion about displaying links in tweets.

1. This is what a link looks like, in text:

41 people call this [photo|http:\//bit.ly/DMhr] a favorite.

2. When rendered:

41 people call this photo a favorite.

I've posted a number of tweets in this format, and so far no one has expressed any confusion about it, or even curiosity. I guess they just figure it out? Not sure.

Thanks to Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy for pressing the point.

Update: David Berlind asks "Would the markup syntax eat into the 140 char limit?" -- yes -- there's 3 added characters for each link.

Update: Joey Baker has a great idea. If the stuff betw the pipe and the right square bracket doesn't begin with "http://" the displaying software should add it. That's 7 characters saved. Worth doing, imho.

A story unfolds on Twitter

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:20:48 GMT

Someone I know, not well, who lives far away is going through hell. The story is notable because it's unfolded in real time on Twitter.

I don't want to say who because: 1. It's very heavy. 2. I don't want to burden this person with the decision about how public she wants to be. If she reads this and says it's okay to post a link to the on Twitter, I will. If not, I'll wait.

I wanted to write about it because the story is so powerful.

It begins a few days ago, her mother is sick. She takes her to the hospital. It's obviously pretty bad, but we don't know how bad. Not clear if they do, but her mother is terrified. The sister is there, with neices. They argue about something. The mother gets worse. The doctors do tests. The mother dies.

From there the situation spins out of control. The story is told with a very wet brush, with lots of paint splattering all over the place in 140-character snippets separated by huge gaps of time. It's the unpredictability of it that makes it so compelling.

I can't imagine the pain.

But there it is, shared, in real time, with a few hundred on-lookers.

I feel like I'm witnessing history.

It helps that the protagonist is a great writer.

Who will prosecute Bush?

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:22:46 GMT

Pretty sure someone in the Bush Administration is going to get prosecuted for war crimes. And the lower-downs were smart this time, they made sure the higher-ups were on the hook, at least according an interview on Fresh Air last summer with Phillippe Sands, an international expert on war crimes prosecution.

When I've heard this discussed in the media recently they've been approaching it as if it were an American decision whether or not to prosecute Bush. Obama could just punt, and let the international authorities worry about it. Then the question is would the US protect a former President against prosecution.

Because this is such a touchy subject I feel it's necessary to say that I don't know the answer, I see both sides. If Bush is prosecuted, it could serve as a deterrent to future Presidents against committing war crimes, or it could have a chilling effect and make Presidents fearful of defending the country, knowing that their fate and the country's will be separated after they leave office. (It's hard to imagine a sitting President surrendering to international prosecution.)

I will say this, I thought it was good that Ford pardoned Nixon. The country had other big problems to deal with in the 70s, and we had already paid a terrible price for the Watergate scandal. In many ways the same can be said of the fix we find ourselves in now, in 2009.

Bad UI

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:14:34 GMT

This dialog appears every 10 minutes or so when the SlingPlayer app is running.

The new version doesn't work on my machine. Obviously, there should be a way to tell this dialog to go away and never come back.

How to display a tweet? -- Part II

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:33:57 GMT

Last night the wind howled in the hills of Berkeley. It could have been the sound track for the opening scene of a horror movie about global warming. It got me up at 1:30AM with a burning question. What's the best way to display a tweet?

It's not a joke, it actually happened.

So I posed the question with a few examples, and a great discussion ensued, and I think we arrived at an excellent answer.

1. I had assumed that a mini-icon would work the best, but Alexander Horre asked why not use a bit of text, so if someone makes it bigger, the link symbol would grow along with everything else. Good point, and I think that's the way to go. (Many others said the same thing, Alexander was just the first.)

2. Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy both argued for making the links work just like HTML links, but I didn't see how, until Chuck suggested that we use wiki notation, and this is very workable, and if that formatting is detected any software should recognize it and display it accordingly. Example.

3. What software? Well lots of apps display text that came from Twitter. Facebook does, as does FriendFeed and many others. Of course I wouldn't have asked this question if I weren't too.

Prior art search: How to display a tweet?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:08:21 GMT

You know what a tweet is and how they're displayed in Twitter.

Pretend you're a time traveler from 2003 and someone told you that a primary software interface was going to include bare naked urls, would you have believed it? I wouldn't. I still don't accept that it's the best way to display a tweet.

These days lots of software displays them, not just Twitter. And they all have the same problem -- how to display the urls. I haven't seen a lot of approaches. I'd like to generate some, to gather different non-raw-url approaches. Here's an example:

Where are the Users at the User Generated Content Expo?

We don't shorten urls just to conserve space within the 140-character limit, shortening urls also makes our writing more legible. For that application we could go the full distance and collapse the url down to an 11-by-11 icon. If so, what should the icon be? Here are some examples of vast collections of free mini icons.

I'm assuming the best approach is to shrink the url to an icon and store it to the right of the text but if you knew the big ugly url was going to shrink to an icon, you might start putting the urls in the middle of sentences in ur tweets.

Maybe a mini-icon isn't the best way to go, maybe there's another way altogether to neaten up tweets and make them more readable? (And yes, I know some people will say the way Twitter does it now is the best possible way, please assume we're all considering that possibility as well).

I'm interested to know what people think.

SF-bound with wifi

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT

I just got on the inbound BART from the Berkeley station, and I have wifi through the Cradlepoint but I don't have a net connection because we're underground.

However, in a few minutes, between Ashby and MacArthur, we will emerge and my router should be able to establish a connection. This probably will happen a lot faster than if I had used the software on my laptop to connect cause it's pretty clunky and slow and sometimes takes two or three times to connect. The Cradlepoint seems to do this much better.

And you'll know it's working because you're reading this.

The Holy Church of Checklists

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:21:40 GMT

Yesterday's piece on investigative research in the blogosphere was one of the most polarizing pieces I've ever written, going all the way back to the first email essays I wrote in 1994. Those really upset a lot of people, because I saw where my industry, which now is pretty much gone, was getting swallowed up in the open formats and protocols, both technologic and human, of the Internet. Now, 15 years later, I stand by any of those pieces. I've become a better writer, for sure, I'm better able to anticipate people's objections, I have a better sense of what people are ready to hear, but every once in a while I just ignore all that, and write what I really think.

I had a good but brief talk with Howard Weaver, who proudly told me he had two Pulitzer Prizes, and who recently retired from McClatchy. We found we had a lot to talk about, and we're quite close in age, and I think for two aging guys we've still got some flexibility in our thinking. He lives in Sacramento, just a couple of hours away by car. I'm sure we'll get together, and when we do, I don't doubt it will be interesting and productive.

That said, a fair number of other people expressed anger at me and my piece, but always with remarkably honest words like "You seem to be saying" or "I suspect you believe" or somesuch. Those are big red flashing warning signs, your inner-editor should stop and ask for a rewrite, because you're using whoever you're writing to as a foil, somehow you want to express something, to be heard, and you need this crutch -- this symbol to be angry with. I wish somehow I could make people filter these things for themselves. We all want to be appreciated for our individuality, no one wants to be treated as a symbol.

Or I could just write a followup, like this one.

I also wrote a piece about economics, but if you take it at face value you'll see it's another media story. I had just listened to 1/2 of yesterday's Meet The Press, and was disgusted that the reporters on the roundtable were basing their analysis on a lie. Then later that day Jay Rosen, who is a great teacher of things I am very interested in, provided a framework for all this. The media and the people they interview have an agreed upon set of assumptions, Jay calls this the sphere of consensus, and it doesn't matter if they're true or not, and many of them are not. They have a finite set of them, so any reporter only has to master the list, and then each politico he or she interviews is asked to recite his or her poetry about each item on the list. They judge the quality of the pol by the quality of their prose and how ruffled they get. The more ruffled, the more points for the journo, the less ruffled, the more for the politico. It's a game.

There are some people who are regulars on the shows who clearly don't buy into this nonsense. Krugman for one. I was also struck by a Fresh Air interview with Chuck Todd last week where he explained how he was learning the ropes as a member of the elite priests of the Holy Church of Checklists. But I think of Todd as one of the few who think independently, and forms his own theses and tests them scientifically. This is my kind of journo. I also like Brook Gladstone and Bob Garfield, because they sometimes break out of this straight jacket themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, whether you're a pro or an amateur, I think the real difference between the men and the boys, the women and the girls, is this. In these challenging times do we have the guts to admit that the government prints money, and accept the complexities that come with that, and ask our politicos what happens when they've exhausted that option, instead of asking them nonsense questions about cutting expenses or raising debt, and watching the politico just sidestep it and answer the question they really want to.

In other words, I think the reporters who get so angry with me are doing so because I don't buy into the Sphere of Consensus Jay talks about. Instead I buy into the Sphere of Don's Amazing Puzzle. I know that my eyes deceive me every day, they see only what they expect to see, and unless I develop methods to check my vision, I will keep believing in systems that don't work.

friendsOfDave on Twitter

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:42:01 GMT

friendsOfDave is list of blogs, like an old-style blogroll, but with a difference. Every time one of the blogs in my list updates, an app on my server sends a link to Twitter, identi.ca and FriendFeed.

http://twitter.com/friendsOfDave

http://identi.ca/friendsOfDave

http://friendfeed.com/friendsofdave

This makes it easy for me to keep up with the blog posts, which come much more slowly than tweets, of people I think of as friends -- in the blogging sense -- people who I want to keep current with.

Here's a list of the people: .

This neatly solved the problem outlined in The First Church of Scoble, where I said I wanted to hear about Scoble, but not the full blast of his Twitter stream. To some extent this isn't even about Scoble the person, because people talking about Scoble (something he actively encourages of course) is all part of the Church effect. Unless he turns his blog into a firehose, we can have just-enough Scoble, along with some Doc, Jen, Betsy, Fred, Jay, Scott, Om, Lance, Rebecca, Gartenberg, et al.

I've had a few days of F-O-D, and I like. It went quiet over the weekend, but now it's Monday morning and things are picking up. Last week was CES so there was a lot of tech stuff, and I was worried there might be too much, but things are more balanced this week. I still need some more political blogs to add to flow, but I want to do that slowly too.

And part of the way I measure success is that the people in the group seem to be following the group. I think this is important. Maybe it will evolve into some kind of meta-publication. Or a conference? I have no idea. I do know they're all creative interesting people who are likely to have some cool ideas if there are any to be had.

Everyone can follow... The more the merrier, as usual.

A consumer complaint about Consumer Reports

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:57:29 GMT

This story just drips with irony!

2.5 years ago I had just signed the papers to buy a house in Berkeley, and based on past experience as a home owner, it was time to become a member of the Consumer Reports website. I figured if I'm going to be spending thousands of dollars on this house, it would make sense to go for the premium service, so I could access all the information on the site. Doing my part to support a non-profit that does good work. I even checked the box that said they should automatically renew me every year without requiring confirmation, that's how sure I was this organization, above all others, could be trusted.

No fault of theirs, my credit card number got out to some bad guys in Malta or Africa, and the credit card company detected it, contacted me as I was checking into a hotel in NY (by declining the charge, thank you very much) and after talking them into approving the charge (while dripping wet from a NY rainstorm) we agreed they should cancel the card and issue a new number.

So, when Consumer Reports tried to charge my annual fee, it was declined. They sent an email, I went to the website, entered the new number, clicked Submit. I then got an email thanking me for subscribing to the print magazine! Which is something I totally did not do, mean to do, want to do, under any circumstance. I am always trying to reduce clutter, and I hate getting magazines I never asked for in the mail, and I certainly don't want to pay for magazine clutter in my mailbox.

So I called their 800 number (hard to find on the website) and asked nicely but firmly that they cancel this subscription that I did not want. I just want the website, thank you. The operator assured me it had been done, when I asked her to confirm what I had asked her to do.

All was good until the latest issue of Consumer Reports magazine arrived in the mail last week. I expect no matter what I do I will continue to receive the magazine, which I have been charged for and no doubt will not be refunded. I could make a case out of it, but it's just $26 and that values my time pretty cheaply. I know there's a recession, but I will have to settle for airing my issue publicly in this blog post.

How investigative research happens in the blogosphere

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:49:28 GMT

One of the common complaints from people in journalism about bloggers is that we just comment on reports in the news, we don't do original reporting. It's so often repeated it's become a cliche, but it's simply not true and I can prove it.

Draw a continuum of different kinds of news, at the left edge put a dot and label it "Event." At the extreme right edge put "Commentary." On the line between those two extremes, somewhere put a circle and label it "Reporting."

No one questions that bloggers produce writing that belongs at the right edge of the continuum, but then so do pros. That's editorial and op-ed pages. People like Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, David Broder, Krugman -- in days gone by James Reston, Russell Baker (my childhood role model). Think of it as shared territory between pros and amateurs.

At the left edge, bloggers win hands-down. We have far more original sources blogging than the pros have writing in their pages. Over time, as the thirst for news goes up and the volume provided by the pros goes down, expect to see more. The thirst to be heard has always been high, and this is fueling the explosion of blogging at this edge.

Now, if you're a regular reader of Scripting News, you see us do investigative reporting all the time. And I'm not using the plural in a regal sense, I very much do mean "us" -- as in me and you and a whole lot of other people. For example, in December, after seeing Tweetree, and having put a lot of work into systematizing thumbnail generation (with the ongoing help of a reader, who lives in Turkey), I wanted to connect the two. So I proposed a way to do that. Immediately a flood of comments probing my decision, and a number of suggestions that I look at work done by others that I hadn't found when I looked. Now this process is not trivial, it's the equivalent of a reporter making dozens of phone calls to experts. Sure, I'm not probing their ethics, looking for malfeasance, whether or not they're bugging Watergate, or stealing funds from taxpayers or widows, instead -- they're doing that to me. Which I've learned to live with, and see as a good thing. I know my heart is pure, but they don't, at least not at first. They are right to be suspicious of a fellow technologist. Many are corrupt. I've writen about that here. (Part of the reason there's so much corruption, btw, is that the professional press including some of the pubs we all revere, have been playing footsy with the industry for a long time. But that's another story, one often told here, btw, which has gotten me a rep with the press for being an "irascible gadfly.")

Anyway, a comment left here by a reader in December bothered me, so I looked into it and found he had something, so I revised my approach, and published the revision here, on Friday. Then another reader suggested I use a format that Digg had proposed, and I agreed, so -- another revision. Now here's a key point, in all the reporting I had done up till this point, I had never stumbled across this. It hadn't been reported on by pros as far as I could tell, and up till that point, none of my readers knew about it either. Is this an investigative process? Absolutely. Is it journalism? I don't see how it's any different from the best journalism done by the pros, except 1. it's done out in the open, that's an essential element, and 2. it's being done by people who do it for reasons other than being paid, directly, for it. To trivialize those reasons is to ignore why people want knowledge, to ignore the motivations of the sources and the readers, both of whom are essential to the news processs (though the journos are often loathe to acknowledge this), and neither of whom are paid for their efforts.

But even then the story is not over. Another reader says there's a mistake, the format wasn't authored by Digg, it was actually authored by Facebook! I did a bit of investigation and couldn't find a claim that they authored it, or a news report, but I did determine that they supported it, by doing a test, that worked. We saw a citation on the Digg site that said that Facebook was the source, so that was good enough for me, and I revised my piece accordingly. (I allow myself that until the day closes, then if I want to revise I have to write another piece, like the one I'm doing now, that's why serious stories on Scripting News tend to come in a series.)

Finally I published a "cap" to the series, and reported on the significance of all this work. A full week of work, with lots of human contact, research, sourcing, fact checking. I'm sure there will be some who say this doesn't belong in the circle in the middle of the continuum above, and I'm sure we'll get ample opportunity to discuss that, and learn from each other.

Elmer Fudd goes on a Westful We Tweet

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:04:37 GMT

I am not an economist

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:52:56 GMT

Even though I'm not an economist, I'm pretty sure that the US government can print money.

So if we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, that does not imply that someone has to lend us $1 trillion and it does not imply therefore that someone will have to pay someone back that money at some date in the future. If there's an economist listening who thinks this is not true, please say so and everyone else ignore what I'm about to say.

So then why does the discussion on Meet The Press and This Week revolve around how much better the private sector could spend the money or how we're passing on the problem to future generations. That seems like hooey. They have these discussions based on a make-believe premise that there are only two ways for the US government to pay for something -- taxation or borrowing. There is a third way, the one they're taking -- they just invent the money.

Now, in normal times you pay for this invention with inflation, but inflation isn't a problem -- quite the opposite, the world economy is having a massive going out of business sale. Prices are going down. Think they're low this week? Wait till next week, they'll be even lower. And wait is what people do, and that drives the prices lower. It's like inflation in reverse. Worrying about inflation now is like a starving man worrying about getting fat if he eats too much. You'll take your calories any way you can get them. Anything that makes people want to buy things now is a good thing for the economy. One way to do that is to give them money by hiring them.

So forgive me for thinking the analysts on TV are either corrupt or idiots, or whatever.

And of course please forgive me if I'm wrong and the government isn't going to print money to get out of this hole.

Back at the dawn of time

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:19:15 GMT

I happened to trip over this Youtube video of John Lennon, Paul Simon and Andy Williams at the Grammies in (I think) 1975. They're announcing the winner of the Best Song, I think -- as usual Lennon is very funny and wry, and Simon is funny too.

Some observations...

1. There's a surprise guest toward the end, I won't spoil the fun by saying who it is, but we might spill the beans in the comments, so if you don't like spoilers watch the video before reading the comments.

2. Either John Lennon was short or Paul Simon is standing on a box. It's weird how a lot of famous people are really short, but you never find out until they stand next to someone who you know is short.

3. I don't get the joke about "dawn" -- Lennon says: "So this is what Dawn does." Dawn of Tony Orlando and Dawn? Hmm.

4. Weren't they both disapponted that Olivia Newton-John won? The competition was so good, Elton John, Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Maria Muldaur.

5. Muldaur's song, her only hit, Midnight At The Oasis, also played a big role in the fabulous movie, Lost In Translation.

6. Unrelated, on NPR yesterday I heard that Enya has sold 70 million albums and lives in a castle in Ireland and is not lonely.

Two old friends: Twitter status and spewage

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:06:21 GMT

It's amazing to me, the Twitter Status Report and Twitter Spewage Report are both still running. You leave those background projects around and they just don't go away.

I wonder sometimes how long after I die will some "Dave Winer code" be running somewhere on this planet? It could be over very quickly, or you never know, maybe some of my code will run a long time. I, of course, won't be around to find out.

Anyhoo, here are the links...

http://twitter.scripting.com/status.html

http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html

And here's the blog post in April last year announcing the spew report. It was shortly after this that Twitter started becoming unreliable. Wonder if there's a correlation? Heh. That's supposed to be a joke. Okay sorry.

How to include a thumbnail in the HTML of a page

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:12:27 GMT

If we had a registry for emerging web standards, we would have added one to it yesterday. The emerging format has been proposed by Facebook, supported by Digg and ratified by FriendFeed, and yesterday -- Scripting News. The format allows a photo-oriented web site or individual web page to include a thumbnail, so that when it's referred to by a site such as Digg or FriendFeed the representation may include that thumbnail.

I support this because: 1. I have such a website. 2. And I believe that sites like Digg, FriendFeed, Twitter are more attractive and useful when they include little bits of color graphics. It's the same principle that guided Apple to create the Macintosh in 1984, almost 25 years ago, when the current form of user interface was character-based.

To support this format, include a <link> element like this:

<link rel="image_src" href="http://static.flickrfan.org/afp/thumbnails/2009/01/10/trwas2108818.jpg" type="image/jpeg" data-width="150" data-height="122" />

And some other metadata, as explained on the Digg site.

View source on this page to see a real-world example.

I tested it with both Digg and FriendFeed and found that it works, although there at least one place where FriendFeed could support it, but they don't, yet.

Update: James Holderness says this came from Facebook, and Digg says so on their site, but the page they link to doesn't seem to say anything about thumbnails. I searched and found a citation here, but he doesn't link to any Facebook spec. I think it's fair to say Facebook supports it. I'll test now. Result: Yes! Here's a screen shot of how they appear in my Facebook profile. So they must be added to the list, which I will do now.